A Study On Rhetorical Relations Of English Argumentative Writings Written By Chinese College Students

Studies on writings by English as a foreign language(EFL)learners are abundant over the last few decades,but mostly concentrate on lexicon,morphology,syntax and grammar.In recent years,scholars show an increasing interest in text analysis.Developed by Mann and Thompson(1986),Rhetorical Structure Theory(RST)provides a framework for describing rhetorical relations among parts of a text.It is an effective tool for analyzing written texts and is especially appropriate for analyzing argumentative texts.Mann and Thompson(1988)propose a list of 24 rhetorical relations in RST.According to Azar(1999),5 of the 24 rhetorical relations are recognized as argument relations: justify,motivation,evidence,concession and antithesis.Most of relevant previous studies focus on the contrastive significance of the writings of English native speakers' and Chinese EFL learners' or simply count and classify the rhetorical relations in texts,while few of them emphasize on the differences of all types of rhetorical relations including argument relations across different score levels and without further investigating the correlation of rhetorical relations as well as argument relations with writing scores.Therefore,this study examines rhetorical relations in English argumentative writings written by Chinese college students in general and across different score groups in order to explore three research questions: 1)What are the types and distribution of rhetorical relations in Chinese college students' English argumentative writings? 2)What are the similarities and differences of rhetorical relations across high-score group,middle-score group and low-score group writings? 3)How do the amount of rhetorical relations and rhetorical relation types,the amount of argument relations and argument relation types correlate to writing scores respectively? In total,168 college student argumentative writings(each around 200 words)written in the year 2015 were drawn from the TECCL(Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners)corpus as the sub-corpus.The sub-corpus covers a wide range of topics or prompts so that the data are more representative and reliable.Based on the average rating of two expert teachers,the writings are divided into three groups: Group H(high),Group M(middle)and Group L(low),each with 56 writings.After careful segmentation,annotation and analysis,it is found that 1)Elaboration,justify and joint are the three most frequently used rhetorical relations;restatement,otherwise,enablement and sequence are used least,which may result from the characteristics of these relations.In terms of frequency,students use more subject-matter relations than presentational relations,more nucleus-satellite relations than multi-nuclear relations,more non-argument relations than argument relations.In terms of probability,the probability of using presentational relations in students' writing is higher than subject-matter relations,the probability of using multi-nuclear relations is higher than nucleus-satellite relations,and the probability of using argument relations is higher than non-argument relation.2)The similarities across three score groups are generally consistent with the overall rhetorical relation features reflected in students' argumentative writings.The differences of some rhetorical relations across three score groups reveal certain regularities,i.e.from Group H to Group M to Group L,the amount of some relations increases or decreases.It shows that argumentative writings of high scores use less elaboration and joint,less multi-nuclear relations,but more justify,background,summary,solutionhood,condition relations,more nucleus-satellite relations,more presentational relations and more argument relations.What's more,through examining differences of rhetorical relations between any two groups,it is found that the difference of joint relation between Group H and Group L is the biggest.3)The study verifies the positive correlation between the amount of rhetorical relations and writing scores and investigates the positive correlation between the amount of rhetorical relation types and writing scores,but the correlations are weak probably due to the similarity of the students' English language proficiency and dense writing scores.The study shows no significant correlation between argument relation and writing scores,but the evident preference of argument relations in high-score groups in this study as well as the function of argument relations implicate that students should be encouraged to use more and various argument relations in argumentative writings.Pedagogically,rhetorical relations help students or teachers understand the writings' structure better.It can serve as a feedback or it can be introduced in class or in textbooks.The research objective of studying correlation of argument relations to writing scores is tentative.I hope it has certain implications for future studies.