A Study On The Use Of Chinese Meta-discourse Markers In Formal Writings Of American Students

The meta-discourse can be interpreted as the ability to discourse and the capability to control discourse,in addition to the pragmatic awareness and cognitive perceptibility that embodies in language acquisition of foreign learners.As the foreign learners approaching to their advanced stages,it is crucially necessary for them to make further improvements in writing skills and discourse competency,thus the development of meta-discourse ability in order to break though the bottleneck in Chinese learning.Since the meta-discourse markers(MMs)is the unique linguistic form to guide and identify meta-discourse,the foreign learners’ meta-discourse ability thus can be well reflected.Therefore,this thesis is based on the studies in the application of Chinese meta-discourse markers in formal writings of foreign learners who are in the advanced stages of Chinese learnings in the U.S.National Chinese Flagship Program(Nanjing center)by using meta-discourse makers as a starting point,comprehensively focuses on illustrating the close relationship between meta-discourse markers and the meta-discourse ability of foreign learners,analyzing and interpreting the appealed stylistic features and errors when the foreign learners apply the meta-discourse markers,also to the discussion on the topic of how to carry out studies of meta-discourse in teaching Chinese as a foreign language,by applying induction,corpus analysis,in addition to the adoption of qualitative and quantitative analysis.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter explains the purpose of the thesis,the research methods,the research status of MMs at home and abroad,along with the classification of MMs and the theoretical basis of the classification.The second chapter consists with a statistics analysis on American students’composition corpus in a total of 183,000 words that reveals the characteristics and the rules of principle of using MMs,and put forward the problems of oneness,bias and semantic inconsistency.The third chapter makes a further examination of the stylistic features and corpus characteristics of MMS in American students’ formal writings is carried out in conjunction with the basis of the previous analysis.The chapter presents the discussion on the differences in three literary forms of practical writing,narrative and argument,as well as in three language styles of news,political and academic style when using MMs respectively.Moreover,the deficiency of students in the use of MMs has been pointed out,as well as the corresponding teaching suggestions.The fourth chapter consists of the discussion on the errors in American students’formal writings by using errors analysis in the basis of Selinker’s interlanguage theory.It summarizes the types of errors for which are mostly caused by misdirection,leakage,generalization and mixture when using MMs.For the common causes of errors,the negative transfer of mother tongue,the generalization of target language rules and the avoidance strategy in the result of cultural factors are among the very top three reasons.In view of these errors,the thesis put forward the corresponding teaching suggestions.The fifth chapter conclues the induction and collation of research content and main ideas,as well as the deficiencies of the thesis and problems worthy of further discussion in the future.