A Study of Contrastive Rhetoric in Discourse Organization of Chinese and English Educational Emails/E-messages

摘要

This thesis reports a cross-cultural study carried out to explore similarities and differences at the comparable level of discourse organization between Chinese and English writing. The subjects of this study consisted of two groups, providing data for,respectively, quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The quantitative data are 96 educational consulting and reply emails/e-messages between universities in Mainland China and U.K. and native Chinese students/graduates who want to study for a Master's degree in those universities. The qualitative data are obtained from the questionnaire survey and interviews. The 279 (valid) participants were native Chinese speakers,among which, 197 were second-year students in Zhejiang Universities, and 82 were overseas students studying for a Master' degree in a variety of U.K. universities.The results show that Chinese discourse exhibits some unique organizational patterns,however, these features were not preferred by native Chinese people. Instead, the results reveal that with the growing trend of globalizations Chinese discourse tends to show more similarities than differences with the English one at the organizational level. Such cross-cultural similarities in rhetoric may result in positive bi-transfer. Therefore, the findings of this study indicate that culturally unique features may not be prevalent, and that predominantly preferred patterns may be shared by different languages, and the dynamic language system may receive influence from other linguistic systems with which frequent contact has been made.

目录

英文文摘

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the study

1.2 Layout of the thesis

Chapter 2 Overview of Theories on Writing

2.1 The nature of writing

2.2 The approaches to writing

2.2.1 Writing as a cognitive activity

2.2.2 Writing as a social and cultural activity

2.3 The interface of L1 writing and L2 writing, and language transfer

Chapter 3 Contrastive Rhetoric

3.1 Audience awareness

3.2 Overview of research approaches

3.3 The value of contrastive rhetoric for analyzing written language:a TESOL perspective

3.4 Research on contrastive rhetoric between Chinese and English written text

3.4.1 Chinese vs. English

Chapter 4 An Experimental Study

4.1 Research questions

4.2 Research design

4.2.1 Subjects

4.2.2 Data

4.2.3 Method of analysis

4.3 Results

4.3.1 Description of the quantitative results

4.3.2 Description of the qualitative results

4.4 Discussion

4.4.1 Possible locations for the main idea in Chinese and English discourse

4.4.2 Similarities and differences in the main idea location between Native Chinese people's and native English people's educational reply emails/e-messages

4.4.3 Similarities and Differences in the main idea location between native Chinese people's L1 and L2 consulting emails/e-messages

4.4.4 Differences in the main idea location between native Chinese people's L 1 educational consulting emails/e-messages and L 1 educational reply emails/e-messages

4.4.5 Similarities in the preference for the deductive and inductive organizational pattern between Chinese and English discourse

4.4.6 Importance of teaching English discourse structure

4.4.7 Influence from experience with western culture on rhetoric style

4.4.8 Conclusion

Chapter 5 Conclusions

5.1 Summary

5.2 Pedagogical implications

5.3 Limitations of this study and suggestions for future researches

Bibliography

Appendix