A Discourse Approach To EFL Argumentative Writing

EFL writing research sees a long and fruitful history in the world, however, seldom can we find contributed studies from the perspective of discourse system. Therefore, it's an innovative and worthy attempt to study EFL writing employing a discourse approach. In China the researches on EFL writing employing a discourse approach are quite rare, and it needs much further work in this field. With the development of the theory and practice of discourse or text analysis, there is an urgent need to incorporate into research at the discourse level contrastive writing studies.Since the concept of "discourse " was given in 1952 (朱永生, 2003), the theory and practice of discourse analysis have experienced fruitful development, and kinds of discourse approaches have come forth, among which, the Utilitarian and Confucianist Discourse System (UDS and CDS) proposed by Scollon & Scollon (1995) draw many scholars' attention, In order to explore to what extent UDS influence English writing and CDS influence Chinese writing, this thesis will firstly propose the conception of UDS and CDS and present the characteristics of these two discourse systems, which provide theoretical support and framework for the following empirical study.In the empirical study part, this thesis selected 15 Chinese expert compositions which got full marks and received excellent commentaries from the raters in the College Entrance Exam, and 9 essay samples of TOEFL and GRE officially issued by ETS (Educational Testing Service). Based on the theory and under the framework mentioned above, this thesis then analyzes the inner impacts of these two discourse systems on native writings. Unlike many studies, the contrastive work in this thesis do not have any preference for the Oriental or Western style and just tries to dig out the influences by objectively presenting the differences between the two discourse systems.The results of the study show that UDS and CDS do have great influences on the native argumentative writing. This may give some implications to EFL writing that more emphasis should be put on the discourse structure and features of the compositions to make students be familiar with the discourse system of the target language. That is to say, only when the EFL writers are familiar with the discourse system of the English language can they produce natural and idiomatic compositions.