Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of Reformulation In Academic Writing: A Pragmatic Approach

Reformulation, as a discourse organization strategy and a strategy of pragmaticadjustment, plays a very important role in academic writing. However, few studieshave given a full picture of this common phenomenon in verbal communication, andfew studies have discussed how Chinese EFL learners use this pragmatic strategy intheir academic writing.This study aims to investigate how Chinese EFL learners use reformulation intheir MA theses’ writing. In order to achieve this goal, two types of data werecollected, that is, research articles from three top international journals (IJAs forshort), whose authors are mainly native speakers of English, and Chinese EFLlearners’ MA theses.This study first redefines reformulation by arguing that a reformulation marker(RM for short) is a necessary part of a reformulation and then establishes a conceptualframework to analyze the syntactic environments where reformulation markershappen, the distinction of global reformulation and local reformulation, and thefunctions of reformulation as well. Within the established conceptual framework, thisstudy gives a detailed description of how experts use reformulation in their academicwriting, and a comparison is made to explore how Chinese EFL learners use thisdiscourse strategy.The statistical analysis of the data yields the following results:(1) With regards to the frequency of RMs used in MA theses and IJAs, that is tosay only happens in MA theses, which indicates the oral style in Chinese EFLlearners’ academic writing; experts employ significantly more that is in theiracademic writing than Chinese EFL learners, while they use significantly less namelythan Chinese EFL learners.(2) Concerning the distribution of RMs’ syntactic environments, there is a greatunbalance between the different locations in both MA theses and IJAs. Furthermore,there are also some differences between MA theses and IJAs in RMs’ location wheneach RM is considered. (3) When the frequency of types of reformulation is concerned, significantly lessglobal reformulation is used in IJAs than in MA theses, whereas significantly morelocal reformulation is used in IJAs than in MA theses.(4) There is a great unbalance in both IJAs and MA theses when thecorrespondence between RMs and types of reformulation is considered. In addition,there are also some differences between MA theses and IJAs in using RMs to indicatetwo types of reformulation.(5) Five categories of specific functions of reformulation are found in both IJAsand MA theses, and these functions are used with a great unbalance in both IJAs andMA theses, but with similar tendency in using two major functions (i.e. clarificationand specification).(6) There is a great unbalance in both IJAs and MA theses when thecorrespondence between RMs and various functions of reformulation is examined. Inaddition, there are also some differences between MA theses and IJAs in using RMsto indicate different functions of reformulation.Theoretically, reformulation is redefined by arguing that a RM is a necessary partof a reformulation. This is helpful to identify what is a reformulation and what is not areformulation. Meanwhile, that RMs encode conceptual meaning is evidenced by thediscussion on the syntactic environments where RMs happen, the correspondencebetween RMs and global and local reformulation, and the correspondence betweenRMs and the specific functions of reformulation. This is of great importance for theunderstanding of RMs and discourse makers as well. In addition, this study is boththeoretically and pedagogically significant for English learners’ using these RMs andreformulation appropriately in their academic writing by providing a full picture ofreformulation. At the same time, the findings of this study provide obvious directionsfor English teachers and EFL learners to deal with the problems of using thispragmatic strategy in academic writing.