A Study Of Causal Clause Relations In Middle School Students’ English Writings

Discourse is a hierarchical relational system,which is formed by a limited set of clause relations.Causality is a typical clause relation widely used in discourse.On the basis of previous studies on causality,this paper studies the causality composed by Chinese middle school English learners in English writing through corpus analysis,based on the theory proposed by Hoey and Winter and with the help of “Chinese Learner English Corpus”(CLEC),“Chinese students’ 10,000 English composition Corpus”(TECCL)and the free online English native corpus “British National Corpus”(BNC).The focus of the study mainly includes the characteristics of the use of causality and the expression of causality,as well as the problems existing in the expression of causality in English writings by Chinese middle school students compared with the English native language.Through the investigation and analysis of all kinds of causality words in middle school students’ writings,the research finds that middle school students compose causality with particular characteristics.Generally speaking,when students use causality conclusion,they tend to use causality conjunctions that represent the result relationship,but with relatively few causality prefixes.There is fossilization in the use of causality conjunctions,and because and so are most frequently used to express causality.In addition,the students’ stylistic consciousness is weak and the students’ writings show strong oral features.On this basis,the inherent causes are analyzed.It is pointed out that the characteristics of students in the evaluation of causal relationship are diverse due to different thinking modes.Therefore,in order to improve students’ ability to use causal relations,we need to pay attention to the differences between China and English,and try to cultivate students’ language and cultural awareness for improving students’ English writing ability.