An Empirical Study On The High School English Letter Writing Teaching From The Perspective Of Rhetorical Structure Theory

As one of the four basic language skills,writing plays a significant role in English teaching.In recent years,practical writing has been a hot topic for English writing in the college entrance examination,but there are still many problems in students’ writings.The main reason for students’ low score in writing arises not from content,but from the logical structure and discourse coherence.Rhetorical Structural Theory is a descriptive theory of text organization,which provides a method for characterizing text structure primarily in terms of relations that hold between parts of the text.In view of this,guided by RST,this paper explores how rhetorical relations,as a means of cohesion,play a role in the textual coherence.Based on RST,this paper takes the composition of two classes in grade two of Chengdu No.20 High School as the research corpus,and conducts the corresponding quantitative and qualitative analysis through questionnaire,interview and test.The empirical research mainly consists of the following four aspects:1)To investigate the high school students’ understanding of rhetorical relations.2)To prove that the writing ability of senior high school students can be improved under the writing teaching integrated with the theory.3)To analyze the rhetorical relation of senior high school English letters.4)To study the significance of rhetorical structure in training students’ writing strategies and improving teachers’ teaching methods.The results show that: first,most of the students know the cohesive words of some rhetorical relations in the text,and they use some of them in their writing,so they have a certain sense of discourse;second,after the teaching experiment,the writing strategies of the students in the experimental class have a positive change and their writing scores are significantly higher than those of the students in the control class,which shows that the writing teaching combined with the rhetorical structure effectively improves students’ discourse analysis ability and English writing level,and enhance their interest and selfconfidence in English writing;third,the most commonly used rhetorical relations in letters are purpose relation,motivation relation,evidence relation and elaboration relation.In addition,the correct use of rhetorical relations is positively related to students’ writing performance,and the composition score with better discourse logic and coherence is much higher.The results of this study will help learners to arrange the framework and structure of their compositions more rigorously,improve their understanding of the rhetorical relations between sentences and paragraphs.Applying the theory of rhetorical structure to the teaching of English writing can not only strengthen the attention of English teachers to the rhetorical structure,but also provide an important reference value for senior high school English teachers to design writing teaching activities.