Syntactic Features In Using Of The Subordinate Clause By Chinese Senior High School Students

Current research and pedagogical literature on L2 writing reflects great concern over the processes entailed in the generation of a written text. Numerous articles and studies have presented significant findings on the psycholinguistic process of writing. While the shift in focus from writing as product to writing as process has opened up an important new paradigm, it would be a mistake to altogether abandon the research on the end product of the writing activity. It is believed that only through studies on both writing process and writing product can an integrated and sophisticated theory of L2 writing develop. The present research focuses on the study of students'writing product.The analytical framework designed to identify text features established macro- and micro-levels of text construction. On the macro-level, the logical and organizational features of student texts are analyzed, while syntactic and lexical features of the texts are discussed on the micro-level. (Coulthard, 1985; de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981; Halliday & Hasan, 1976).The present study, embarking from the micro-level point of view, employing the quantitative-plus-qualitative method, through a careful investigating on 90 Chinese senior high school students'compositions, aims to present the syntactic features in using of the subordinate clause by Chinese senior high school students. Specifically, this study addresses: 1) The general using features of the subordinate clause by Chinese senior high school students in their inter-language; 2) The distinct using features of the nominal, relative and adverbial clause by different English proficiency level groups; 3) The relationships between the use of different clauses and the overall EFL writing quality. The major findings are: first, the using number of the subordinate clause increases linearly from Grade One to Three, and generally, the nominal clause and the adverbial clause are more frequently used than the relative clause; second, in use of subordinators and clause patterns, the majorities show slight improvement as students reach upper levels, and students in Grade Three are more inclined to use few subordinate clauses but more infinitive or participle phrases in order to gain better coherence in writing; third, qualitatively, the use of the subordinate clause shows an obvious monotonousness in all students'compositions; fourth, every kinds of clauses'using correlates insignificantly with the writing quality, which means that Chinese senior high school students have a kind of blindness in using of different syntactic structures.Drawn from the findings of the present study, both theoretical and pedagogical implications for teaching beginning EFL learners are proposed; dynamic and multidimensional research methods should be for further studies. Chinese English teachers are suggested to pay special attention to the explicit instruction on syntax as well as the differences between English and Chinese.