Research On Language Features Of Academic Style By Foreign Students From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory

With the rapid growth of international degree students coming to study in China,the country has put forward higher requirements of "improving the quality and efficiency" for international education.Scientific research ability is an important part of higher education,and thesis writing is a concentrated expression of scientific research ability.How to finish an academic paper in Chinese has become an increasingly important topic.The problem encountered by international degree students in thesis writing is that they do not know how to express their views "appropriately",which is in line with the genre norms.Therefore,it is of great significance to explore the academic stylistic competence of international students from their academic papers to improve the quality of international students’ education.As genre is a functional variant of language,this paper analysis genre features from a functional perspective.Under the framework of three metafuncions of Systemic Functional Linguistics,we have made a research on the genre features of international students from the functional perspective.Specifically,in terms of the ideational meaning,we explore how learners infer conclusions and express ideas by conducting a transitivity system analysis of discourse.In terms of interpersonal meaning,we made an analysis on how the foreign students achieve the rhetorical persuasive function on the basis of Appraisal Theory by Martin.In terms of textual meaning,we analyze how discourse coherence is achieved within the framework of genre coherence theory,metadiscourse theory,and contextual theory.In addition to analyzing its semantic expression characteristics,we also found their errors through comparison with native speakers’ papers on the same topic.We collected 40 unmodified course papers from international students and journal papers from native speakers of the same topic as a reference standard.We have built a small corpus of papers for international students and native speakers.Using UAM Corpus Tool,Python,Ant Conc and so on,we made an analysis on the language characteristics of foreign students’ academic styles.After summarizing the characteristics of Chinese academic language styles and comparing them with data from international students,we reached the conclusion as follows:1.In terms of the expression of ideational meaning,we analysed the process,participants and the environmental elements.The following results are found:(1)The relational process appears most frequently in foreign students’ papers,indicating that they attach more importance to the description of the nature of scientific research objects.The international students can explain the characteristics of scientific research objects in various ways,and basically master the essential requirements of academic papers.(2)Time,Conditions and Manner components in environmental system are the main ways to construct the environmental path,and the Time component is used most frequently.(3)The essence description of the research object by international students is not clear enough.The learners are not able to describe the characteristics of things accurately and deeply.The learners use relatively simple words to describe the features of research objects.(4)The Process is highly specific and subjective,which did not conform to the requirement of abstraction and objectivity in the academic style.Compared with native speakers,there are more specific action or subjective feeling process descriptions in learners’ academic papers.(5)The conditions for the establishment of the phenomenon are insufficiently explained.The frequency of Condition components in learners’ academic papers is relatively lower.Learners’ explanation of the conditions for the conclusion to be valid is not as sufficient as that of native speakers,so the scientific rigor of their academic paper is also reduced.2.In terms of the expression of interpersonal meaning,I made an analysis on the features of the Attitude,Graduation and Engagement resources in the framework of Appraisal Theory.(1)The international student builds a more tolerant and open image of researchers by using Engagement resources.They use more dialogic expansion resources,especially the entertainment resources,showing that they could accept more voices,build a large academic space,and reduce the possibility of conflicts due to different positions.(2)The international student builds an authoritative academic identity by using more force resources and rising resources.They are more inclined to use force and rising resources to reinforce their viewpoint outputs and are willing to take maximum responsibility for their positions to win readers’ trust.In addition,they use a large number of deny and counter resources to establish their own authority by rejecting certain viewpoints.(3)In general,there are fewer evaluation resources and insufficient expression of interpersonal meaning in international students’ academic papers.The frequency of language resource use in each subsystem is much lower than that of native speakers,indicating that students have rhetoric consciousness of persuasion in academic genre,but there is still a significant gap from proficiency.(4)There is insufficient explanation of the necessity of research,which weakens persuasive function of the text.In the Graduation system,language resources are mostly pointed to the research topics rather than research behaviors in students’ papers,showing that they are unable to evaluate others’ research,one’s own research process,research significance,etc.,and failed to appear as a professional scholar in the academic field.(5)The argument lacks necessary support;therefore,the international students fail to establish a reliable researcher image.The pronounce resources are used less frequently,indicating inadequacy in inductive and deductive process.Attribution resources are less used,as there are fewer cases where one’s position is supported by the perspectives of other researchers.The use of quantitative resources is infrequent and does not meet the academic paper’s requirements for accuracy,resulting in a lack of necessary objective data support and decreased credibility of the argument.(6)There is insufficient integration of academic groups in students’ academic papers.The frequency of attribute resources is very low,indicating that there are not enough voices of other scholars,and there are problems such as introducing insufficient front-end research result,inaccurate format and a single external voice source.(7)There is too much individual intervention,making it difficult to establish a calm and objective researcher image for the foreign students.In academic papers written by learners,emotional evaluation resources are used relatively more frequently;pronouns such as“我”and“本人”pointing to the researcher’s self are used frequently.3.In terms of expressing the discourse meaning,we use the coherence theory of discourse-"coherence = cohesion + domain consistency" as the theoretical foundation,and redefine the specific connotation of domain consistency,pointing out how academic papers achieve coherence through language in the aspects of field,mode,tenor,and genre.The results of the examination of the discourse meaning expression in the learner’s paper are as follows.In terms of the cohesive forms,there are some features:(1)The high frequency and rich types of Transitional Markers indicate that foreign students often use explicit markers to mark the cohesion between sentences,so as to promote readers’ understanding and thus achieve textual coherence.(2)There are few cohesive markers between paragraphs and the overall structure of the text is unclear.In international learners’ papers,this type of sequence marker is rarely used as a framework,for the overall coherence of the discourse,failing to achieve the coherence at the textual level.(3)There is a tendency for the discourse to be more colloquial in transitional,frame-based,and annotated metadiscourse in students’ academic papers.By influencing the consistency of style,that is,introducing colloquial words into written language,the coherence of the discourse is affected.In terms of discourse coherence,there are some features in the expression of learner’s discourse meaning as follows.(1)The macro-structure of the discourse is incomplete,or some parts of the paper fail to achieve the function of the paper,resulting in insufficient coherence in genre.In the learner’s discourse,the phenomenon of conclusion missing is more serious.At the same time,the sequence of some papers’ parts does not meet the requirements of the paper.In addition,there are also some steps in the learner’s paper that do not conform to the function of the paper,such as question-answer process in class and teaching plans.(2)There are too many topics in the paper,and the connections are not close enough,resulting in insufficient linguistic field coherence.Therefore,learners’ academic papers did not discuss around a clear core theme,and the linguistic field coherence was insufficient.(3)The tendency towards colloquialism is severe,leading to insufficient grammatical coherence.Grammatical coherence is determined by the formality of the language used in the discourse.In this paper,we examined the formality of the discourse from five aspects: nouns,classical Chinese elements,copulas,conjunctions,and macro-level features of the language.Learners’ performance at various levels is different from that of native speakers,indicating that there is a tendency towards colloquialism in the learners’ discourse,and the formality of the language is not as high as that of native speakers,leading to insufficient mode coherence.(4)Inconsistent discourse role positioning results in insufficient coherence of discourse.Discourse coherence refers to the social role positioning of the writer and the reader in the article.In the learners’ academic papers,there are many first-person singular and second-person singular or plural pronouns,indicating that the discourse has a strong narrative quality,and the role positioning in the discourse changes from researcher to narrator,which can easily lead to insufficient coherence of discourse.