An Analysis Of Chinese English Majors’ Narrative Writing Based On Genre Theory

Writing has always been one of the most important but difficult issues to be treated in the field of second language acquisition.Among the four skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing,writing is generally regarded as a highly comprehensive and difficult skill to improve.Narrative writing,as a common genre and a basic form of thought expression,should be grasped by English learners first.English majors,in particular,need to continuously improve their storytelling skills to better present comprehensively a real and three-dimensional China to the world.However,previous studies in this field have focused more on the level of words and sentences as well as design of teaching practice,and less on the discourse level of narrative writing outcomes by English majors,especially lacking of a comprehensive genre analysis of students’ narrative writing.Therefore,this study,based on genre theory,Labov’s(1972)narrative analysis model,the linguistic features of narrative put forward by Joyce & Feez(2000),and characteristics of a good narrative essay,adopted the method of textual analysis,to analyze 240 narrative texts written by second-year English majors in a provincial university in Shandong Province,through conducting a rather in-depth genre analysis at both macro and micro levels,for an attempt to explore the following two questions about English majors’ writing:(1)What are the generic structural features of students’ narrative writing?(2)What are the linguistic features of students’ narrative writing?By analyzing English majors’ narrative writing,the study could not only present the generic structural features and linguistic features of their writing,but also find out the strengths and weaknesses in their writings.What’s more,tracing back to the sources of the problems based on students’ reflection on their own narrative writing,this research could,accordingly,put forward some proper suggestions for students and teachers,so as to improve students’ ability of narrative writing.The results of analysis show that: firstly,most of the students have a good command of the generic structure of narrative essays and there are four common structural patterns in students’ narrative texts.Although the obligatory structural components at the macro level are presented in 90% of their essays,many students could not fully understand the function of each component of the generic structure of narrative essays,and do have problems with their choice of details and the structure arrangement,which have indeed affected the effective achievement of their communicative purposes.Secondly,at the micro level:(1)Students,generally speaking,could choose proper processes according to the purpose of their writing.As reflected,they used material processes the most frequently in their writing,followed by relational processes,but they were less capable in the variety of process choices.(2)Concerning their choice of mood,students’ narrative writings are dominated by past tense and declarative mood,but there are problems in tense agreement and the frequency of dialogue.(3)In terms of discourse cohesion and coherence,students’ narrative writings are dominated by paralleled structure,reference and lexical cohesion.Among reference,personal reference is most often chosen,and among lexical cohesion,repetition is most frequently used in students’ narrative writing.At the same time,they also use conjunction as one of the cohesive devices.To address the situation of students’ writing,this study suggests that teachers should first promote students’ extensive reading,enhance their understanding of the generic structure and linguistic features of narrative texts,and guide them to accumulate step by step words and phrases in good narrative texts and try to use them appropriately in their own narrative writing.In the process of writing instruction and later feedback,teachers should guide students to take special notice narratives’ social function and its realization devices,so as to promote their realizing that fact that discourse generic structural elements and their related lexical and grammatical feature are limited extremely by the social function of discourse genre.Admittedly,the corpus selected in this study is small and the analysis of linguistic features is not detailed enough.On the whole,this study has largely achieved the expected purpose by demonstrating Chinese English majors’ general features of macro-structure and linguistic devices in their narrative writings and could provide some reference and insight for future narrative writing instruction.