An Empirical Study On College English Writing In Terms Of Cognitive Reference Point Model

Writing is a basic part of language education and an important tool of international communication. The progressing in Discourse Analysis has afforded great helps for scholars to delve deeper into the process, product and pedagogy of L2writing, and the development of the cognitive-psychological linguistics also begins to inspire them to use the cognitive theories, such as Prototype Theory and Figure-Ground Theory, to perfect the subject and investigate language education. However, only few of them have discussed English writing on the basis of the cognitive reference point (CRP) models, let alone the empirical studies.In light of this limitation, an empirical study on78English major students was conducted in order to find out the answers on the research questions that whether the use of CRP models could increase college students’interests in English writing, and whether the use of CRP models could improve the coherence of their English writing. The results of the study demonstrate that the use of CRP models could not only improve coherence but also enrich content of the writing. Besides, the results of questionnaire reveal that the use of such models could not significantly increase students’interests, but the qualitative analysis on interview paper indicates that students did feel empowered by the explicitly teaching of the CRP models in structure planning and coherence constructing, and then consciously use such models in their writing.The construction of this dissertation is composed of six chapters in all. Chapter One is an overall introduction on the research background, the purpose and the significance as well as the organization. Chapter Two is a systematic retrospect of literatures on coherence in different linguistic perspectives, together with those theoretical and empirical investigations focusing on coherence in ESL and EFL writing. Chapter Three, Four and Five are the main parts of the dissertation, involving the presentation of the theoretical framework, the CRP models, and the description of the research methodology and also the discussion of the experimental data and the analytical results. Chapter six draws a conclusion on major findings, expounds pedagogical implications as well as limitations of the research that need to be further investigated.