An Approach To Teaching English Writing With Contrastive Rhetoric

Most non-English majors in China have much difficulty in their English writing due to the following reasons. On the one hand, English writing is not an independent course in most colleges and universities, so the students have no access to the systematic and professional writing instruction. As a result, most of them have failed to develop their writing skill and to meet the requirements of college English syllabi. On the other hand, Chinese writing features and thinking patterns with which students are more familiar exert more or less negative influence on their English writing; consequently, their typical Chinese way of thinking is frequently reflected in terms of textual organization and structure as well as grammar and diction. The present research attempts to try a direct and explicit approach in teaching English writing which is expected to help raise students' awareness of rhetoric differences between English and Chinese writing by a period of systematic training guided by contrastive rhetoric and noticing hypothesis.The paper first reviews the history and development of noticing hypothesis and contrastive rhetoric both in theory and in language teaching practice. The previous studies show that although the use of contrastive rhetoric in classroom teaching can develop students' awareness of the rhetoric differences between English and Chinese writing, yet it does not contribute much to the improvement of the students' writing ability.Based on noticing hypothesis and contrastive rhetoric, the author designs an English writing program to two parallel classes attended by non-English major postgraduates. The program is intended to raise the rhetoric consciousness of differences in the two languages by guiding the subjects to notice the specific form and the organization of English writing conventions. The author of this paper hopes that a period of step-by-step writing training will help the subjects to follow the basic English composing process and learn how to achieve coherence, unity and how to develop paragraph with different ways. By observing the effects that the systematic training takes on the subjects, the researcher of this experiment finds that the subjects' awareness of the cultural influences on written communication and the rhetoric differences between English and Chinese has been significantly raised. The students have developed a better idea of the basic concepts of English writing. Furthermore, they have acquired the basic composing process and produced satisfactory essays in terms of coherence, unity, paragraph development and overall structure and so on. Thus it can be concluded that this kind of teaching and training is beneficial to raising the students' awareness of English writing rhetoric ,and improving their English writing.