Appraisal Resources in Chinese College Students' English Argumentative Writing

Abstract

Appraisal system is the new development of Halliday's interpersonal function, which is a very important parameter in argumentative writing since its purpose is to influence and convince readers. Directed by appraisal system, with UAM corpus tool for annotation and statistics, this paper carried out a comparative empirical research in interpersonal meaning on Chinese and American students' 64 English argumentative essays. The study found that the overall use of appraisal resources in Chinese English majors' essays fell far behind American college students, with the only exception of affect resources. In the attitude subsystem, it shows that Chinese college students have a poor vocabulary, colloquial expressions, subjective logic and other problems; in the engagement, students from the two countries have an abundant use, which may be relevant to argumentative writing itself; although graduation resources are the nucleus of appraisal system, they are least used by the two group of students, probably caused by the reason that graduation meaning are often covert in the text. The study contributes to revealing a comprehensive difference of appraisal resources between Chinese and American college students' argumentative writing, and the teaching of writing in such genre will also be benefited.