Influence Of Culture And Thinking Patterns On Chinese English Majors' Argumentative Writing And Its Pedagogical Implications

The communication across cultures has become increasingly frequent, and the cultural teaching has received more and more attention in foreign language teaching, therefore in this new situation, the thesis aims to answer these questions: 1) Do Chinese culture and thinking patterns still affect the English writing of Chinese students? 2) How are the influences revealed in their writing?The author makes an analysis of 40 argumentative essays of Chinese English majors in the second year study in Capital Normal University. The research is made up of two parts. The first part is the analysis of the influence of Chinese culture and thinking patterns on students' argumentative writing. The second part is interviews with 10 students in order to validate and complement the results of the data analysis.The results demonstrate that, Chinese culture and thinking patterns still exert fairly strong effect on students' argumentative writing. The influences are showed in five aspects: introduction, body, and conclusion of their essays, rhetorical devices and use of personal pronouns. In the way of opening the topic, many students prefer to provide the background information first, and then proceed to the topic. In the body, owing to traditional concept of interpersonal relationship, few students employ the technique of anticipating opposition. In the conclusion, many students end their essays in a slogan-like tone to make appeals. In the aspect of rhetorical devices, parallelism and rhetorical questions are often adopted in students' writing. And the use of personal pronouns is surveyed to find that most students prefer to express their opinions in collective voice. However, most students have clear stance towards the topic rather than taking a balanced attitude. Under the guide of English writing instruction, most students can realize the differences in...