User:Mandyjingw/sandbox

My topic is topic sentence in argumentative writing.

I choose this as my topic because the following reasons

1. I wander is there any differences between Chinese students' writing of topic sentences and American ones

2. My major is English Education, so I do research on this topic can also help me learn how to write or teach topic sentence. Summary and Definition of my Topic

My topic is topic sentence in argumentative writing. About this topic, I'd like to do some researches to look for the definition of it, the mistakes students often made in topic sentence and the reasons behind them. Bain defines the sentence containing the general point of a paragraph as the opening sentence and such kind of sentence was named the topic sentence by McElroy. (Cited in D’Angelo 1986 ）

 Background of the Study 

The teaching of English argumentative writing has been more and more valued in China. People tend to learn how to write an argumentative writing from many aspects to express their opinions, and the English teachers in China try to enhance the students writing ability by enlarging vocabulary and mastering grammar as much as possible. However, the biggest obstacle for Chinese people to write an argumentative writing is the different ways of thinking between the Chinese and English people. So the writing style of English essay and Chinese essay is very different. Compared with English writing, Chinese writing is more casual and informal, while English writing is more logical and clear. Thus, the topic sentence as an almost indispensable element in English argumentative writing is often forgotten by Chinese learners. The Chinese people have weaker awareness to write a topic sentence in the beginning section of an article or a paragraph. Many students couldn’t manage the topic sentence very well, even the students majoring in English. So, analyzing English majors’ writings and exploring the reasons behind them is a good way for students to improve their ability of writing topic sentences. By looking for some information in library and on the Internet, the writer finds that there are already some papers talking about topic sentences. However, most of them tend to explore the functions of topic sentence instead of analyzing the mistakes students make.

Writing topic sentences in argumentative writings is very important. First, D’Angelo (1986) indicates that the topic sentence can help the writer organize his or her thoughts effectively, facilitate the readers’ readings and make the reader follow the writers’ logic more easily. Second, forming the habit of writing topic sentence will make writers’ thinking style close to the English style. It is good for them to know more about English culture. Third, for writers, it is a good way for them to train the ability of summarizing or concluding. As we all know, most of the topic sentences play the role of summarizing the passage that will come below. So it is necessary for students to write topic sentences in an argumentative writing.

When it comes to the current situation of English majors’ topic sentence in Argumentative writings, we can find the research of Qi & Zhao (2009), who demonstrate that 11.4% of English majors’ compositions have no topic sentence. The research indicates that it is necessary to rouse students’ sense and give more explanations of writing topic sentences.

Although there are already many studies on argumentative writing, most studies just focus on the writing skills of argumentative writing. For example, Liu Xiaoyan (2007) talks about how university students express their standpoints in argumentative writing. And in Smith (2008), he talks about the frequency and placement of topic sentence. However, these researchers all don’t explain how to write topic sentences and how to avoid mistakes in using topic sentences.

 Topic Sentence 

Bain defines the sentence containing the general point of a paragraph as the opening sentence and such kind of sentence was named the topic sentence by McElroy. (Cited in D’Angelo 1986 ）

Topic sentence plays a vital role in argumentative writing. Halliday (1970) uses the theory of systemic-functional linguistics to explain the content of one paragraph and divide it into two parts—the standpoint and some new information to support the thought. In this way, the standpoint means topic sentence. The author thinks it provides the theoretical support to explain the role of topic sentence in argumentative writings: It indicates the writer’s standpoint and forms a connection between the preceding and following.

But it is difficult for students to write an authentic topic sentence appropriately. It not only demands students’ ability of expressing their own opinions, but also generalizing the examples below. Besides, the common syntactic mistakes in writing topic sentences could not be overlooked as well. They include verbal errors, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, sentence structure, articles, prepositions and so on. In addition, there are some common cognitive problems happening in students’ argumentative writings. For example, Chinese students usually tend to write ambiguous topic sentences due to the influence of the thought of moderation, but this is not encouraged in western culture; English people tend to express their attitudes clearly and directly, and critical thinking is popular in their writing.

Argumentative Writing
As for the definition of argumentative writing, there are different explanationsand understandings. Generally speaking, argumentative writing is termed as “persuasive writing”, with the purpose ofconvincing people that his or her view is right (Berrill, 1996: 2). With the development of cognitive linguistics, some scholars tend to define the notion of argumentative writings from cognitiveperspective. Othersbelieve that argumentative writing is “critical writing”, which is opposed to the former opinion. The former profiles problem-solving orientation while the laterprofiles the writer’s critical thought.(Andrew, 2007 ).

There are some reasons to explain why argumentative writing is more and more relevantwith our daily life. First, argumentative writing is one of the most formal writing-styles, which could explain one’s standpoint more directly compared with narrative writing or poetry. Second, in mosttime, argumentative writing is the writing style whichis applied inEnglish testing, for example, in TEM-4, TEM-8 and some international tests, as TOEFL and IELTS. Thus, it is obvious that the proficiency in argumentative writing is critical for students to get a good score. Last but not least, writing argumentative writing is helpful to cultivate critical thinking. As we all know, thinking and idea is the soul of an argumentative writing. Opposing otherwriters’ thought is allowed in argumentative writing as long as you could justify youropinion.

Absence of Topic Sentence
Actually, in English writing the topic sentence is the soul of an argumentative writing. While, there are many learners who forget to write the topic sentence in a paragraph, especially beginners. When it comes to theseniorEnglish majors, who have accepted professional learning for three years, the situation is also notso optimistic. According to Appendix A, it is not hard to find out that the number of paragraph among 24 argumentative writing is 90. Whilethe number of topic sentence is 73. It means that not every paragraph has a topic sentence. Thus, in average, each student writes 3.75 paragraphs in an essay. However, the amount of topic sentence is only 3.041. According to observation, wefind most studentshave no awarenessto write a topic sentence in the first paragraph or the last paragraph. So it turns out that senior English majors also have the phenomenon of the absence of topic sentences.

Lexical Errors
Lexical error is also a common error in topic sentence. It refers towrong selection and distortion of words. Sometimes, it is influenced by mother tongue. In Chinese, people only need to remember a Chinese character’s writing and its meaning, then people could use it. So when people try to learn English, they tend to remember a word’s spelling and its corresponding Chinese meaning. But it is not practicalfor language learning,forthere are so many idioms and phrases in English. In addition,one word has so many differentcontextualmeanings. It means that an English worddoes not have a one-to-one relationship with a certain Chinesecharacter. Then the lexical error will occur.

Examples from the research:

l  There are so many mistakes in my worst essay, for example, misspelling. (such as)

l   It brought happiness for my life (to)

Thus, it is obvious that just keeping the Chinese meaning of an English word in mind is not enough. Students should also try to read more original English works andtry to perceive each word’s connotation. It also indicates that a teacher had better guide studentsto remember words with the help of English-English dictionary.

Grammatical Errors
Morphological error means, as mentioned before, “one which involves a failure to comply with the norm in supplying any part of any instance of these word classes” (Jame,2003: 71). According to thisresearch, there are the following common morphological errors in English majors’ writings.

l   V.+ed form. It means the past tense. Generally, it is used when the writer mentioned the things happened before. While, sometimes, due to the carelessness or something else, students would forget to change the form of it. There is a vivid example in Appendix D: Looking back to my writing process, I found several reasons, which contributeto my success. (contributed). The requirement is writing the best/worst essay you ever wrote before. It means the success has already happened, so the word “contribute” should be changed into its past tense form.

l   N.+s. Refer to write a countable noun in its plural  form, people should plus –s at the end of the word. It is an easy regulation to understand, while the error will always appear especially when there are some qualifiers in front of it,  for example, one of my best friend, every minutes.

l   V.+ing. There are usually two forms of errors in this  part. First, some students would get confused when the verb is used as subjects, the verb should use its –ing form. Second, -ing form is sometimes confused with the –ed one. For example, the moment is so excited (exciting) Syntactic Errors

Syntactic errors include verbal errors, relative clauses errors, adverbial clauses errors, sentence structure errors, articles errors, prepositions errors and conjunctions errors.

This is the table, which summarizes the number of various errors.

Table 1

Linguistic Transfer
Linguistic transfer includes positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer will help learnersto learn a new language according to the similaritiesbetween two languages. Whilenegative transfer is the main cause of absence of topic sentence or some other errors. The first interviewee told me that when he studies English he is always influenced by mother language. We could know it clearly from Table 2. It includes some specific errors, such as the sentence structure errors, the morphological errors and so on. Chinese people tend to emphasize the most important thing first and will add some more information later. ParticipantNo.1 mentionedin the interview: “sometimes my topic sentence couldn’t completelysummarize the content ofthe paragraph”

Table 2

Induced Errors
Induced errors occur mainly due to the wrong input,and it could explain syntactic errors. Obviously, wrong input will lead to wrong output. Due to current education environment, many students learn language simply through accumulating knowledgefromtextbooks. Thus, to some extents, they will make mistakes on the sentence level because of their weak linguistic knowledge. Unclear knowledge or the wrong application of grammar will lead to the wrong sentences. Just as the participants No.2 mentioned in an interview that she thinks that absence of enough linguistic knowledge is one of the reasons for problems in her topic sentence.

Psychological Factors
Psychological cognitive factor as one of the emotional factors may influence English writing to some extent, for example, the motivation. Many students begin to write topic sentences due to the demand of their teachers. Sometimes the teacher will provide a fixed model of structure for their students. So the structure is stiff. In addition, the mood of nervousness will also influence the writing. Participant 2 mentioned that when she wrote a English writing in exam, his writing skills will decline. Actually, a good and natural topic sentence demandthat thestudents shouldbe interested in English culture and write the topic sentences spontaneously because they perceived English writing styles from some original English works. If students just follow their teacher’s fixed structure, although the structure is qualified to some degree, the style and logic is still Chinglish.

Lack of Communication Strategies
Compared with speaking, students use less communication strategies in English writing. Actually, when communication strategies come to writing part, it mainly talks about the communication between the writer and the reader. In order to let readers get deeper understanding of their essays, the writer should focus on changing the way of writing to express themselves clearly. While, some participants said that they are not good at changing the structure to express their opinion in English .In this aspect, communicating with friends in English is an important way to train communication strategies.

Reference:

Journal:

D’Angelo, F. J. (1986). The topic sentence revisited. College Composition & Communication,37(4), 431-441.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1992). Language structure and language function. In J. Lyons (ed.),New Horizons in Linguistics, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 140-165.

Andrew, R. (2007). Argumentation, critical thinking and the postgraduate dissertation. Educational Review,59(1): 1-18.

Fagan, E. R., & Cheong, P. (1987). Contrastive rhetoric: Pedagogical implications for the ESL teacher in Singapore. Relc Journal,18(1), 19-30.