Research On The Online Model Argumentative Essays For Ielts (module A) From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

In recent years, IELTS (International English Language Testing System) has become the most widely recognized accurate pattern to assess the English language proficiency of those whose native language is not English, and it has witnessed an increasingly rapid development and promotion in China. However, the average IELTS score of Chinese examinees ranks the last six among the forty countries and the points for writing part is much lower.To find out the causes for the low points, the writer of this thesis made a survey of how Chinese IELTS candidates prepared the ILETS writing. The result indicated that 70.3% of respondents (60 examinees randomly selected on-line) prepared for writing with reference to online model argumentative essays for IELTS. Because they are model essays, the points that the examinees obtained should be comparatively higher. Despite the multitude of reasons, the quality of them is questionable. Since one of four criteria in the IELTS writing part is cohesion and coherence, this research is intended to analyze the cohesion and coherence, and textual organization of those essays by mainly employing discourse analysis theories.Firstly, the writer introduces the history and development of discourse analysis both at home and abroad, and then explores theories of cohesion and coherence proposed by Halliday and Hasan. The next part mainly presents research methods and data collection. The study corpus includes thirty online model argumentative essays for IELTS (Module A), collected randomly via Baidu and Google search engines. The collected essays cover the content ranging from social culture, education, technology, media, government investment, to abstraction concepts. The scoring standards for IELTS writing part were the starting point of this research, and the textual structures of those essays were analyzed. The study demonstrated that there were some problems with those essays, including:1) problems in cohesion and coherence; 2) disunion in the overall arrangement; 3) stereotyped sentences and expressions.The purpose of the study is to arouse the potential IELTS takers of the discourse awareness and to provide them with suggestion on how to develop their ability to employ coherence and cohesion techniques in writing. The results of the study admonish the majority of the IELTS candidates to treat those online writing resources rationally. Meanwhile, this research also entails some guidance on the teaching of English writing.