Stylistic Analysis Of An ESL Topical Writing Of Chinese College English Majors

Based on the data obtained from a topic writing test in the English majors at the English Education Department of one normal university in Beijing, the present empirical study describes and discusses the syntactical and lexical features of the writings through statistical analysis. The thesis is composed of five chapters: introduction, literature review, research procedures, results and discussion, and conclusion. The subjects in the study come from English Education Department of that university, with a total number of 385 students from Grade 2002 to Grade 2005. The writing test involved a description of a picture, which lasted 60 minutes with a limit of 300 words. All the test papers were collected, proofread and keyed in computers. The 120 samples were randomly selected, with 30 samples selected in each grade. Based on statistical analysis at syntactical and lexical levels of the sample writings, the author conducted a stylistic description at syntactical and lexical levels, and discussion and conclusion were made.The results show that after the comparison in figures among the four grades, there is significance at both syntactical and lexical levels, which indicates developmental features in the learning process of Chinese English majors.Because of its synchronic nature and its limitation of subjects, the present study serves as an exploratory study for further studies in this domain.