A Study Of The Use Of Cause-effect Discourse-organizing Words In English Majors' Argumentative Writing

English writing is essentially the use of discourse to communicate.For English majors,understanding the discourse patterns in English writing,and using a variety of discourse-organizing words can make English writing highly effective.Cause-effect discourse-organizing words play a coherent role in the discourse.The functions of these words are not performing the ideational function but to organize the discourse structure.It is cause-effect discourse-organizing words that link up with the arguments and opinions in a reasonable and orderly way.And argumentation is a kind of reasoning genre which is based on arguments and opinions,and states the causal relationship between them.Therefore,to a great extent,the quality of writing is determined by the correct use of different cause-effect discourse-organizing words,which are used to present the causal relationship clearly in the essay.The cohesion theory has aroused wide attention from the academic circles since it was put forward in 1976.Many scholars at home and abroad have explored the distribution of discourse patterns in English writing.However,the author finds that they focused on those basic patterns and co-relative discourse-organizing words,such as claim-counterclaim,opinion-example,and problem-solution.There are few intensive studies on the cause-effect pattern and its discourse-organizing words.In addition,the research shows that most Chinese students cannot use the typical English discourse patterns to arrange the macro structure properly.And they are short of discourse-organizing words in their writing.They can not use different words to express the same meaning.What's more,there are fewer students who have the abilityto employ a vast range of discourse-organizing words to make the writing cohesive and coherent.Based on this situation,from the perspective of cause-effect discourse-organizing words,this study investigates the use of these words in English majors' argumentative writing.The purpose of this study is to improve the English writing level by helping students to grasp the rules of overall planning in English writing and master the ability to use abundant cause-effect discourse-organizing words to make the writing cohesive and coherent.In view of this,this paper adopts the corpus-based,questionnaire and interview methods to carry out the research.Firstly,two corpora were established.The sample text of the first corpus included 284 argumentations,which were collected from TEM-4 writing tests for sophomore English major students.In this study,the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(shortened to LOCNESS)was chosen to be the reference corpus.The author chose 220 argumentative essays written by American university students.Next,the author used Concordance in Ant Conc 3.2.4 to search for all the discourse-organizing words in the two corpora.Through comparative analysis,this paper mainly provides insight for the following questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the use of cause-effect discourse-organizing words in Chinese English majors' argumentative writing compared with the native corpus?(2)What is the frequency of the use of cause-effect discourse-organizing words in the English majors' argumentative writing? What are overused,underused,and noused cause-effect discourse-organizing words?(3)What are the factors that influence Chinese English majors' selection of cause-effect discourse-organizing words in argumentative writing?The research results show that:(1)On the whole,the number of cause-effect discourse-organizing words in English majors' argumentative writing is limited,and there are infrequent types.On the surface,there is no obvious difference in the top ten commonly used words.(2)English majors use relatively few discourse-organizing phrases.(3)Compared with the native speakers,English majors overuse thesecause-effect discourse-organizing words,such as as,since,why,explain,so,hence,therefore,result and so on.In addition,a lot of words are underused in English majors' argumentative writing,such as accordingly,explanation,bring about,owing to/of,lead to,result in/from,as a consequence and so on.Apart from the words discussed above,there are 21 kinds of discourse-organizing words that are never used by English majors.(4)In the cause-effect pattern,English majors are not flexible in using its discourse-organizing words.As a result,the essay is vapid and dull as well as lack of persuasion.In order to investigate the underlying causes of the above results,the author also conducted questionnaires and interviews with English majors.The investigation found:(1)English majors' knowledge about cause-effect discourse-organizing words is almost blank;(2)English majors are influenced by learning strategies,and they choose avoidance strategy with regard to lexical output;(3)English majors do not master the rules of the cause-effect pattern.Finally,in view of the above findings,the author puts forward three constructive suggestions on the teaching of English argumentative writing in the future:(1)Teachers are advised to pay attention to the input of discourse-organizing words;(2)They should encourage students to accumulate vocabulary in the form of lexical chain;(3)They should strengthen the application of discourse patterns in English writing.