A Study Of Specific Intertextuality In Chinese High School Students' English Compositions

The theory of intertextuality holds that any text contains the other texts,and any text is the absorption and transformation of other texts.Intertextuality is the internal mechanism of text construction.Through the intertextual analysis of second language learners' written texts,we can explore the external resources that students employed to construct their own texts.In present study,a corpus-based approach was used to study the specific intertextuality in 2806 Chinese high school students' compositions in TECCL corpus.The analysis of specific intertextuality is carried out from three dimensions,namely,intertextuality at the lexical level(cliché),intertextuality at the syntactic level(quotation and conventionalism)and intertextuality at the supersentence level(reference).This study aims to address three questions:(1)What are the characteristics of the specific intertextuality in Chinese high school students' English compositions?(2)What are the functions of specific intertextuality in the text construction?(3)What pedagogical implications can be drawn from this study? The findings are as follows:(1)Cliché is the most frequently used specific intertextuality in the corpus.There are two main functions of Cliché: asserting information and serving as coherence devices.(2)Students tend to quote words said by famous people,words from topic information or proverbs,which are mainly direct citation and implicit source citation.However,there are two major problems in citation,one is that the citations have little correlation with the subject,and the other is that their contents and function are non-matched.(3)In terms of reference,some personal experiences,events or stories from others or books are particularly favored by students,but sometimes they did not use them correctly and logically which leads to the invalidity of reference.(4)The most common conventionalisms in high school students' compositions are social conventionalisms,predictive conventionalisms and situational conventionalisms in turn.Most of the social conventionalisms appear in the practical genres writing which mainly play the role of ensuring the communicative validity and having harmonious effect;predictive conventionalisms frequently emerge in the argumentative papers to predict and presuppose the subsequent text;situational conventionalisms provides background information on the theme.There are common problems of overuse and abuse of conventionalisms in high school students' compositions.Based on the findings of the study,this paper concludes that the teaching of English writing in high school should develop students' ability to utilize texts from the external resources,improve students' awareness of diversified use of lexical chunks,teach students to quotecorrectly,and note that the events mentioned should be related to the subject so as to serve the construction of the text.In addition,special attention should be paid to understanding the function of the nomenclature and avoiding the abuse of conventionalisms.At last,the training of writing based on reading tasks and imitation writing practices are good ways to improve the students' ability to employ external resources for their construction and ultimately improve their writing ability.