Research On Rhetorical Structures In The English Compositions Of High School Students

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is about the produce and description of natural texts. It is a new research perspective to analyze high school students' compositions based on RST. The study selected 60 compositions,half of which are written by proficient students and another half by less-proficient students. By annotating the compositions of the Proficient Group and the Less-proficient Group under the framework of RST, the thesis presents and analyzes the compositions in these two groups from the perspective of the amount, frequency and distribution of rhetorical relations as well as their top structures based on the rhetorical structure diagrams so as to uncover the similarities and differences between them and shed light on the deficiencies of the compositions written by less-proficient students.The major findings of the study include the use of rhetorical relations and the top structure of the RST diagrams. Concerning the use of rhetorical relations, the following conclusions can be drawn. Above all, the biggest difference lies in the fact that the Proficient Group enjoys larger amount and more types of rhetorical relations, indicating a more complicated and varied rhetorical structures of the compositions. Secondly, the dominant relations like Elaboration, Joint and Non-Volitional cause in both groups are almost the same, but the order and the percentage in each group are not, especially the application of Elaboration. Thirdly, among the low frequency relations, Means,Disjunction, Condition and Concession are the relations that have a frequency lower than 2% in both groups. But there are a lot more types in the Less-proficient Group than those of the Proficient Group. Another finding is that some relations do not appear at all in these compositions, such as Unless, Otherwise, Volitional cause, etc. Lastly, a conclusion can be drawn from the Independent Samples Test in SPSS that there is a significant correlation between students' English writing proficiency and the use of rhetorical relations. As to the top structure of the RST diagrams,the general top structures of the compositions are quite similar in both the Proficient Group and the Less-proficient Group,especially the top two levels of the RST diagrams. And the biggest differences lie in the third level of rhetorical relations and the frequency of each type of top structures.The findings attained will be beneficial to the improvement of English writing for less-proficient students and will shed light on pedagogy of English writing for L2 learners. Instead of emphasizing on wording, grammar and syntax, teachers should attach more importance to the arrangement, structure and logic of L2 writing. Applying RST to L2 teaching can not only provide teachers with a new assessing angle for L2 writing, but also be beneficial for L2 learners to learn to organize composition structures more reasonably and finally improve and enhance their English writing proficiency.