The Study On Text Construction Of The English Argumentation From Perspectives Of Adaptive Transfer

Language transfer has been a controversial issue in the field of the Second Language Acquisition for a long time.It is originally associated with behaviorist and structural linguistics.Linguistics has a better and more comprehensive understanding of it from the perspectives of the applied linguistics,psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics at present.At the same time,the study of the transfer have shifted from the study of whether it exists the positive or negative transfer to the study of under what conditions the transfer occurs and of how the transfer interacts with other factors and of why there is language transfer and so on.However,the transfer study in the past mainly focused on the phonological,morphological and syntactic level.The transfer study at the discourse level was so few and was not systematic.In recent years,although the study on the discourse transfer has achieved a lot in the parts of theory and research result,most of studies focus on how writer agent reuses the prior writing knowledge in the two languages in a mechanic way,so it can’t explain how the writer agent reuses and reshapes his prior writing knowledge to fit a new writing context.Taking the theory of adaptive transfer as the theoretical foundation and the components of argumentation at the discourse level summarized by Rennet & Kobayashi(2015)as research frame in a dynamic way,the study deeply explores how the bilingual writers of L1 Chinese and L2 English draw on their writing knowledge when composing L2 English essays across languages and the study especially explain how the writer agent with unbalanced L1 and L2 writing knowledge constructs the text in the two languages.The study also clarifies how the writer agent explains the process of language transfer across the two languages.To achieve the objectives,the thesis analyzes the Chinese essays and English essays of the same topic written by 21 college students in Northeast Forestry University.In the process of the analysis,the thesis takes the components of argumentation at the discourse level summarized by Rennet & Kobayashi(2015)as research frame,that is,,justification and exploration in the two languages.Then through the interview and questionnaires,the thesis will explore the reasons of language transfer in L2 writing.The findings reveal that when constructing the text,the writers influenced by the contextual factors(for example,readers’ expectations,the purpose and topic)will be active in choosing appropriate text construction or reusing and reshaping the text construction.The results highlight the central position of writer agent when they compose L2 text,deciding what kind of knowledge should be reused and reshaped.At the same time,the results emphasize the learning trajectories(e.g.,the L2 proficiency,L1 and L2 writing experience)can influence the individual choice of the text.In a word,the transfer study based on the adaptive transfer in a dynamic way will enrich the theories of reusing and reshaping transfer and the role of writer agent.