A Corpus-based Study Of Appraisal Resources In Chinese High School Students'English Argumentative Writings

In the English subject core competencies,writing ability is an important part of language competence.Besides,argumentative writing also occupies a certain proportion in the college entrance examination.Therefore,argumentative writing is an essential language skill for senior high school students.The main function of an argumentative writing is to convey the author's attitude and views to the reader and the core concept of it is persuasion.And the appraisal is one of the most direct and explicit language expressions of persuasion.Therefore,This paper applies the Appraisal Theory to the analysis of the appraisal resources in Chinese high school students' English argumentative writings(CHSEAW)to address the following questions:(1)What are the distribution features of appraisal resources used in CHSEAW?(2)How are the different appraisal resources realized lexicogrammatically in CHSEAW?(3)How do the appraisal resources and their realizations influence the augmentative writing?In this study,the research subjects are the 110 students in the third grade of a high school in Deyang,SiChuan Province.The grades of these students are in the middle in the school,so they are representative.Students are required to complete the English argumentative writing on the same topic within a specified time.The corpus is built with those compositions.This study applies both the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to explore the appraisal resources in CHSEAW.For the first two research questions,the quantitative analysis method is used to count the quantity of various appraisal resources and their realizations.First the appraisal resources and realizations are manually annotated,and then the corpus tool Antconc 3.4.4 is used toretrieve and count their number.For the third research question,qualitative analysis is used to discuss in detail the impact of these appraisal resources and their realizations on the argumentative writings.The major findings are presented as follows:(1)It is found that all the three kinds of appraisal resources have occurred in the110 Chinese high school students' argumentative writings.And Attitude resources occur more frequently than Engagement and Graduation resources.Especially Affect resources occur most frequently,which means students tend to express personal feeling in argumentative writings rather than make comments or judgement on social behavior and events to support their arguments.The overuse of affect resources will intensify the subjectivity of the argumentative writings.To some degree,the credibility and persuasiveness of their arguments will be weakened.(2)Within Engagement resources,expansion resources take larger proportion than dialogic contraction resources,which means students tend to widen the dialogic space for alternative positions and voices in argumentative writings.The entertain resources outnumber attribute resources,especially the large number of modality resources work as the realization of entertain.Modality verbs focus on “should” and“can”.The use of these modality resources creates dialogic space for different attitude and opinions so that the author's voice and opinions may be challenged.Although there are less attribution resources,they do work effectively in the argumentative writings to reduce the distance between external voices and authorial voices.(3)Within Graduation resources,the main resource is force resources.The overuse of quantification resources and less use of intensification weaken the persuasiveness and reliability of their argumentative writing to some extent.Besides,with a small proportion of focus resources,students tend to increase the commitment to their arguments narrow the dialogic space for other opinions to defend their stance.But there are not enough sharpen resources to adjust the value of attitude and to firm their stands in the writings.