A Contrastive Study On Textual Coherence Of English Academic Paper Conclusions Written By Chinese And English Natives

It is well-known that English journal papers have become one of the majorchannels for spreading scientific knowledge among scholars from all over the world.And it plays an increasingly important role in international cultural exchanges. However,English academic papers which are published in China can only be regarded as theirChinese translation version. There are quite a few problems in textual coherence, whichlead to enormous holdback for Chinese scholars to advance their academic ideas. Thereason conclusion section of journal papers is selected as research object is becauseconclusion reveals the essence of the study. However, it is usually considered as onecomponent of discussion section and is seldom studied separately. In recent years thissection has been studied by a few researchers. For instance, Yang and Allison (2003)distinguished conclusion from discussion section and identified its rhetorical moves.However, no widely accepted research models are established, and especially fewcontrastive studies are done in this section on the issue of coherence.Therefore, after critically analyzing the existing coherence theories, this paper aimsto explore coherence differences in journal papers’ conclusions written by Chinese andEnglish natives from systemic functional perspective based on Halliday and Hasan’ scoherence theory and its theory extension. According to the requirements of the abovetheoretical framework, a pair of micro corpus are established for studying theircoherence differences. The results prove that there are some significant differences inNoun overlap, Argument overlap, Deep cohesion, Stem overlap and so on. Meanwhile,the findings also provide some valuable pedagogical implications for teachingconclusion writing and reading.