This dissertation reports the findings of a comparative case study of English and Chinese academic writing with respect to the use of composing strategies, the patterns of written discourse organization, and questionnaire responses regarding educational background and attitudes toward writing.The subjects were eighteen traditional senior college students -- nine native speakers of English and nine native speakers of Chinese. Each subject was asked to write two essays on given topics with the think-aloud protocol method. While the protocol data showed that the composing strategies used by the American and Chinese subjects were similar, the American subjects used most of the strategies more frequently than the Chinese subjects did and there was a lack of group consistency in the use of these strategies among the subjects in the Chinese group. The written data, which were analyzed by means of Coe's (1988) discourse matrix method, showed that, contrary to prior claims, Chinese writing is not indirect in idea development in comparison to English writing. The questionnaire responses indicated that the subjects' composing performance was consonant with their instructors' methods of teaching writing and the curricula set up for teaching writing. Based on these findings, implications for contrastive research and EFL/ESL teaching are discussed and suggestions for further contrastive studies of English and Chinese writing are made. / Department of English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/182241 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Zhang, Qing |
| Contributors | Ely, Christopher M. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | x, 304 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
| Coverage | n-us--- |
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