An Empirical Study on Information Prominence Reflected in Sentence Structures of Chinese College EFL Argumentative Writing

Wei Ningling

doi:10.5539/elt.v8n12p48

Abstract

<p>Prominence, as an important dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity to evoke a certain substructure as the focus of attention, which can be materialized in a variety of semantic and grammatical expressions (langacker, 1987). Subject of a sentence (Zhang, 2011) and specific sentence structures (Lin, 2013) can bring a substructure into salience by highlighting it in a specifically grammatical place. Accordingly, the place of subject or the specific sentence structures which are applied to emphasize certain information can reflect a writer’s intention of prominence. Thus, this essay will take prominence of Langacker’s cognitive construal as theoretical basis and has an empirical study on information prominence of 20 argumentative writing papers written by Chinese college EFL learners from Leshan Normal University. By categorizing the sentences of each sample into five types of structures－link verb sentence, active sentence, passive sentence, non-finite verbs as subject and the specific sentence patterns, and referring to the statistics of sentence structure application and the specific writing contents, it is found out that the writers are inclined to highlight subjective or static information, which leads to subjectivity and powerlessness of argumentation.</p>

Highlights

EFL (English as Foreign Language) writing is a productive skill for college students, which can explicitly reflect learners’ aptitude in thinking, organization and expression
In order to investigate information prominence reflected in the application of sentence structures, this study is design to solve the following questions: 1) Which kinds of sentence structures are EFL writers inclined to apply for highlighting information? 2) What aspects of information are brought to salience by the application of different sentence structures?
Chinese English learners tend to illustrate their opinions by using active sentences, which highlights the prominence of the initiative of agents and the natural process of an action (Ye, 2009)

Summary

Introduction

EFL (English as Foreign Language) writing is a productive skill for college students, which can explicitly reflect learners’ aptitude in thinking, organization and expression. Apart from the shortage of objective and forceful supports, it seems that the biggest problem lies in their capacity to emphasize information in an objective manner, or prominence of objective information, which is primarily reflected in lexicon and sentence structures (langacker, 1987: 107). Since the choice of lexicon is more elusive and random to be analyzed in a quantitative level, investigating the specific grammatical place of a sentence which highlights certain information means significantly for the information prominence in this study and for inspiration to advance EFL writing performance in the future

Methods

Results

Conclusion