Cultivating The Awareness Of Audience And Purpose: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Writing In EFL

Writing is one of the key components in English teaching and learning. Customarily, Chinese teachers of English tend to believe that mastering certain amount of words, phrases and grammatical rules is tantamount to laying a solid foundation for writing. Therefore, studying words, phrases and sentence patterns is thought to be the way to prepare the students for writing. Traditionally, writing exercises tend to consist mainly in making sentences by linking words and phrases and making paragraphs through a conjunction of sentences. Other means for learning how to write, such as translating, reading, and analyzing a text in terms of its unity, cohesion and coherence, structure and patterns, are used in order that they are imitated in writing by students. Undoubtedly, doing these practices is necessary and useful to the teaching of composition. However, the approach they embody is purely linguistic, and it is based on mechanical training. The actual effect is not desirable and satisfying. This thesis undertakes to discuss an alternative conception of teaching English composition. Introducing a rhetorical point of view to the subject, it emphasizes the sense of audience and purpose during the writing process and analyzes the function performed by these two crucial concepts for guiding writing through its invention process. In particular, the paper turns its attention to how the "writer's block" could be overcome and how the Chinese writers of English could improve the effects of their communication with the native readers of the language.