（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）论主位推进理论在英语写作训练中的应用.pdf

摘 要 iii 论主位推进理论在英语写作训练中的应用论主位推进理论在英语写作训练中的应用 摘摘 要要 本论文是一项实证研究，旨在从主位推进这一角度探讨到底是什么阻碍了中国学生写出连贯有效的文章，同时，该论文还探讨了如何将主位推进理论应用到写作训练中。 对很多中国英语学习者而言，英语写作是最复杂，也是难掌握的技巧之一。有不少教师发现， 很多学生的习作虽然没有严重的语法错误或用语不当等毛病, 却因为存在逻辑松散，论述条理不清等问题而让读者无法理解。因此，找到一种提高中国学生英语写作的统一性和连贯性的有效方法是一项急迫的任务。 作为语言的语篇元功能的重要内容，主位推进为英语写作训练提供了新的视角。句子的主位是信息的起点，因而主位在信息传递过程中承担着特殊的作用。而句子间主位及述位的联系和变化会建立起一种能反映作者思维流向的逻辑链。此外，主述位结构的选择，对已知信息和新信息的安排处理，以及衔接，这些要素共同作用，让语篇具备语篇性，所以主位推进理论是扩展语篇的有效手段，有较大的应用价值。 本论文共分为五个章节。在第一章中作者对国内外专家在主位理论方面的相关研究进行了综述。其中，韩礼德提出的主-述位结构，马丁的主位层级理论，以及丹尼斯和其他学者提出的主位推进理论构成了本论文的理论基础。此外，作者在这一章花了较大篇幅介绍了六种主要的主位推进模式。这六种模式是本研究语料分析的重要标准。 第二章描述了试验的全过程。 这项试验以 40 篇从大学生的课堂作业任意抽取出议论文为样本，调查研究了中国英语学习者在主位成分选用、语篇构架以及信息推进等方面的偏好和存在的问题。 作者在第三章阐述了本研究的三个主要发现。首先，恰当、清楚的主位层级结构是语篇思路清晰和论证统一的重要保障。主位层级结构带有预测性，在信息结构的帮助下，主位层级结构能有效的搭建起语篇或段落的框架。同时，宏观主位、超级主位以及小句主位的统一能避免跑题现象，还能减少对论点的杂乱无章的安排。其次，主位推进是一种扩展语篇的有效策略。写作是一个通过选择主位和述位来强调信息，并使思维得以延续的动态的过程。与此同时，主位和述位的推进又能自然的形成语义链，因为选择某一个主位结构的目的要么是回应前一项主-述位结构，要么就是对下一主-述位结构作出预测。此外，主述位以不同的模式推进，这些推进模式相互作用，形成了连贯的效果。另外，主位推进模式的分布和文章体裁有较大关联。更进一步看，主位推进系统和信息系统相互作用，创建了语篇扩展的最佳方式。从而，对信息系统的研究也是语篇构建研究中不容忽视的部分。第三，主位化, 尤其是标记主位，能顺应语篇衔接、修辞及交际等各种目的。同时，选用不同的主位是实现表达多样化的有效手段。 成都理工大学硕士学位论文 iv 第四章作者深入分析了造成中国学生在语篇构建和连贯性方面犯错误的主要原因。这些原因主要包括语言的负迁移，思维方式的差异，语言能力欠缺，缺乏训练,以及教师本身的欠缺和疏忽等等。 在最后一章作者提出了提高英语写作能力的两种途径：一是要建立“自上而下”的写作图式从而形成一种综合的写作模式 另一方面要培养主位推进意识。此外，作者就如何将主位推进理论结合到写作训练中发表了浅见。 坦率的说，主位理论不是解决一切写作问题的万能药。然而，只有当我们掌握好主位理论，懂得如何恰当的，有条理的安排主位层级和主位结构，才能写出论述充分，内容统一，语义连贯的英语作文。 关键词：关键词：主位结构；主位推进；连贯；英文写作 abstract i an application of thematic progression theory in english writing training abstract this thesis is an empirical study, which is designed to examine what hinders chinese students from producing an acceptable composition from the perspective of thematic progression, and explore how to apply the tp theory to english writing training. for many chinese efl learners, english writing is one of the most complicated and difficult skills to acquire. a lot of teachers find their students compositions, although not seriously mistaken in grammar or diction, are still unreadable due to the disordered statement or loose logic. therefore, it is imperative to find an effective method to improve the unity and coherence of chinese students english writing. thematic progression, as an important aspect of textual meta-function of language, provides us with a new perspective of writing training. the theme of a clause, as the starting point of message, plays a special role in information delivery, and the connection or change between successive themes and rhemes establish a logic chain that reflects the writers flow of thought. besides, the selection of theme-rheme configuration and the ordering of given and new information, plus cohesion, work together to make a text have texture. in fact, the theory of thematic progression could be employed as a valid method to unfold a text. this paper consists of five chapters. in the first chapter, the author briefly introduces the related thematic study conducted by scholars both at home and abroad, among which are the theme-rheme structure presented by halliday, martins thematic hierarchy theory and the tp theory developed by danes and other scholars which form the theoretical foundation of this thesis. this chapter also devotes a plenty of space to illustrate the six tp patterns that are adopted in this research as the criteria for data analysis. chapter two describes the procedure of the experiment which deals with forty expository compositions selected randomly from college students classroom writing. the experiment is an attempted to investigate the preference or the problems of chinese english learners in selecting thematic elements, structuring text and propelling information. in chapter three the author elaborates three major findings of this research. first, an appropriate and explicit thematic hierarchy can guarantee clarity and unity of a text. the predictive thematic hierarchy, with the assistance of the information structure, establishes the framework of a text or a paragraph, and the agreement of macro-theme, hyper theme and clause theme prevents digression and eliminates the illogical or disordered arrangements of 成都理工大学硕士学位论文 ii ideas. second, the tp theory can be used as an effective method to unfold a text. writing appears to be a dynamic process of selecting themes or rhemes to highlight the information and propel the thought, and the progression of theme or rheme will naturally build a semantic chain, because the thematic configuration selected should serve either as a response to the previous t-unit or a prediction of the following t-unit. besides, the themes and rhemes progress in various tp patterns, which interact with each other to achieve a continual effect of a text. moreover, the distribution of tp patterns is sensitive to genre. further more, it is the interaction of tp system with information system that creates the best way of unfolding a text; therefore, information system is another crucial factor that should not be ignored in textual construction. third, thematisation, especially markedness, could be an adaptation to textual, rhetorical or communicative purposes, and the change of thematic element is also a valid strategy to lend variety to the text. in chapter four the author further explores the main factors responsible for chinese students error in textual construction and coherence, which includes negative language transfer, different modes of thought, insufficient language competence, the lack of writing practice, or the incompetence or neglect of the teacher, etc. finally, the writer puts forward two approaches to the improvement of students writing ability: one is to develop a “top-down” writing approach so as to form a comprehensive approach of text construction; the other is to breed the consciousness of thematic progression. besides, the author also presents some feasible strategies of how to apply the tp theory in writing teaching. frankly speaking, the tp theory shouldnt be expected to be a panacea for any kind of writing problems. anyhow, only when we have a good command of thematic theory and know how to arrange thematic hierarchy and thematic structure properly and orderly, could we produce a well-developed english composition in a unified and coherent form. keywords：thematic structure；thematic progression；coherence；english writing 3 独创性声明 本人声明所呈交的学位论文是本人在导师指导下进行的研究工作及取得的研究成果。据我所知，除了文中特别加以标注和致谢的地方外，论文中不包含其他人已经发表或撰写过的研究成果，也不包含为获得 成都理工大学 或其他教育机构的学位或证书而使用过的材料。与我一同工作的人员对本研究所做的任何贡献均已在论文中作了明确的说明并表示谢意。 学位论文作者签名： 年 月 日 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解 成都理工大学 有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，有权保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和磁盘，允许论文被查阅和借阅。本人授权 成都理工大学 可以将学位论文的全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检索， 可以采用影印、缩印或扫描等复制手段保存、汇编学位论文。 （保密的学位论文在解密后适用本授权书） 学位论文作者签名： 学位论文作者导师签名： 年 月 日 4 acknowledgements first and for most, i would like to give my sincere gratitude to my respectable supervisors. im greatly indebted to professor xie xianze, who has been very generous with his time in helping me polish this thesis. without his valuable and generous advice, it is impossible to complete this thesis. also i want to express my deepest gratitude to professor luo runtian, not only for her inspiration and guidance to my research, but also for her successive encouragement. i also deliver my gratitude to professor duancheng. in the course of writing this thesis, i benefited a lot from the discussion with him. i owe special acknowledgement to professor li wuquan, who has given insightful comments and immeasurable patience, which are indispensable for me to make this thesis a better one than it would have been. my thanks also go to all those teachers who gave me generous instruction in the past four years. and particular thanks due to all the friends who have assisted me in collecting data for this research. finally，im deeply beholden to all the members of my family. my deepest gratitude is due to my husband, who has shared all my pains in each painstaking but rewarding day of thesis writing. my heart-felt gratitude also goes to my parents and my pretty daughter for their encouragement, understanding and support in every stage of my study for a masters degree. introduction 1 an application of thematic progression theory in english writing training introduction it is my five-year experience of english writing teaching that shapes my idea of writing this paper. through teaching, i fully understand the significance of developing writing ability. as professor din wangdao has pointed out (1994:7), writing, first of all, makes correctness. because writing is rewriting, the more we revise, the more we can learn, and the more we practice, the better we grasp language. second, writing helps to foster the “architectonic ability of man” (gilbert highet,1976:4). writing is a complicated project of building ideas- we need to collect materials, design the textual structure, deliver thoughts and persuade readers, so writing is a marvelous way to improve our ability of planning and reasoning. besides, writing practice will strengthen our skill as a reader and listener, and thus improve our language competence. it enlarges our vocabulary and incubates the sensitivity to witty expressions; more important, it raises a global awareness of the texture of a text. in addition, good writing leads to success. college students today are required to survive various english tests, in which writing always makes up a large proportion; therefore, an outstanding writing skill is the guarantee of a high mark in exams. furthermore, the jobs that students aspire to usually require a great talent of writing. a candidate who distinguishes himself with a remarkable writing skill usually receives a great deal of gratifying attention from the president of the company. however, to write well is not an easy task. many times in my teaching career, i have heard the grumbling of my students that english writing is one of the most difficult skills to grasp. the author has made a survey and the result reveals that 30% of our subjects list writing on the top of their difficulties. (see appendix 2). the frustrating fact is that a number of students find it is so difficult for them to make a noticeable improvement in writing, no matter how hard they practice. some data of examination also indicate that although students have made many efforts before the test, the final result is quite unpleasant. for example, the data of emt-4 in 2009 indicate that the average score of written test of all usual universities is 16.62 points, making up only 66.5 percent of the total score of 25 points. whats the problem of chinese students english writing? one of the most serious problems is how to organize ideas or outline the text structure efficiently. (zaixing&wu hongyun,1995:43-50). peter g. beidler (2003: 10) has proposed: “an acceptable essay is a bold, clear, and well developed argument presented in a unified, cohesive, and organized form.” so, an acceptable writing, except for the correctness in grammar or diction, must be a coherent and 成都理工大学硕士学位论文 2 unified whole that enables information flow smoothly. in fact, the textual arrangement and coherence are what have been examined in emt-4 examination (see appendix 1). during the process of english writing teaching, the author finds that a big part of learners (31%) take grammatical errors as the greatest barrier that prevents them from producing an acceptable composition, and many others (29%) devote their attention to careful wording and favorable sentence construction, and a few of them notice the significant role of culture (18%). however, they do not pay enough attention to the textual coherence (22%) (see appendix 2). the result is that their compositions may be well-formed in terms of grammar, yet the overall effect is incoherent due to such factors as improper arrangement of sentence sequence, unfavorable progression of theme and rheme, or illogical distribution of old and new information. when the reader reads these compositions, though seldom retarded by mechanical errors, he can perceive little or no flow of the text. without doubt, students deficiency in discourse construction has become an urgent problem for them to solve. in fact, it is not only an urgent problem for students to deal with, but an urgent task for teachers to accomplish. many professors and experts devote themselves to the research of efficient methods to improve their students writing ability. in current china, the mainly adopted approach in english writing teaching is “product approach”，which concerns much about the writing products, but, more or less, neglects the process of writing. chances are that the teachers devote time to grammar practice or sentence pattern drills, and put an emphasis on the error detection and correction; however, they seldom concern other factors such as information organization or text construction (see 4.3). as a result, the students usually regard english writing as a work of stringing together words or sentences, and deem the revising to be a mechanical process of proofreading. this approach is also labeled as “bottom-up” method. the opposite approach is “process approach”, which is developed from the interactive theory advocated by graves. this approach is devoted to help students understand the whole process of writing. according to graves(1978), more stress should be laid on the pre-writing stage (brainstorming) and revision stage, in which teaching practice should be designed to help students form a global consciousness of the text, and to explore their potentiality and creativity in the process of rewriting. so, this approach is also labeled as a “top-down” approach and attracts more teachers in recent years. in fact, both of the approaches have their advantages, but the writer, in this thesis, tries to emphasize the “top-down” approach, which is usually ignored in writing training. anyhow, the best way should be the integration of those two approaches in order to form a comprehensive approach in writing english essays. the tp theory, as an important ingredient of coherence theory, displays a great value in english writing training, for it provides a new perspective of writing analysis and makes it introduction 3 possible to combine two teaching approaches in writing teaching. this paper is made to analyze the factors that hinder chinese students from producing acceptable and coherent compositions from the perspective of thematic progression, with an attempt to investigate how thematic options or tp pattern choices work together to achieve coherence and add some marvelous effects to english writing. besides, it intends to explore how thematic hierarchy, thematic progression and information system work together to unfold a text, and studies how the thematic structure has been used as the strategy to realize various communicative purpose and thus promote the overall effect of the whole text. in addition, it is expected that the findings of this research would be suggestive to teachers and offer the learners a new approach of improving their writing ability. chapter one literature review 4 chapter one literature review 1.1 hallidays framework of thematic structure the scholars of prague school believe that linguistic theory should go beyond the description of linguistic structure to explain the functions fulfilled by linguistic forms. they present sfp (functional sentence perspective), a new approach of analyzing utterances (sentences) from a functional point of view. they regard sentence as a message structure which consists of a theme companied by a rheme, and the structure is expressed by the orderwhatever is chosen as the theme comes first. the configuration of theme + rheme is known as thematic structure (theme-rheme structure). the concepts of theme and rheme can be traced back in 1844, when the french scholar henri weil published de lordre des mots dans les langues anciennes compar es aux langues modernes (古代语言与现代语言的词序比较)(刘润清，2002：111) .in this book he proposes that each sentence consists a “ point of departure” and “a goal of discourse”, and he points out the importance of information-bearing structure of the sentence to the problem of word order. inspired by henri weil (mathesius ,1961: 81), mathesius, the founder of prague school, continues the study in this field and defines “the point of departure” as “theme,” and “the goal of discourse” as “rheme ” (danes ,1974:106). he expounds that the initial element of an utterance has some special function. he analyzes utterances (sentences) from a functional point of view in terms of the information they contain, and he believes that “theme is known information or at least obvious in the given situation; rheme is the nucleus of an utterance, what the speaker says about , or in regard to the starting point of the utterance”. (xu jian,2004:41;liu runqing,2002:112; jiang wangqi, 2008:188) it presents the very information that is to be imparted to the hearer. however, he further puts forward the notion of transition, which is stated as a transitional part between theme and rheme. for instance, “they has come” could be analyzed as “they(theme)+ has (transition)+come(rheme)”. this theory of analyzing the distribution of given and new information in a discourse has been called fsp (functional sentence perspective), which forms the theoretical foundation for later linguistic researches. for example, halliday (2000, 2001a) introduces the notion of theme and rheme to his functional grammar and explores how thematic structure, information structure and cohesion work together to realize the textual function of language. jan firbas (1992), on the base of theme-rheme analysis, discusses the cd (communicative dynamism) of a clause. frantisek danes (1974), who analyzes sentence dynamically, puts forward his tp theory. the research of martin (2007), which focuses on discourse analysis, 成都理工大学硕士学位论文 5 does not surpass the framework of sfp. 1.1.1 concepts of theme and rheme in 1960s, a rich exploration of