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modest.But nowadays, the ways of many people to reply are changing, and they can also answer by saying “Thank you” like English-speaking people. Therefore, the close relationship between language and culture means that one cannot learn language successfully without the related culture.
2.2 Differences in the Thinking Patterns of the Chinese and Native Speakers of English
2.2.1 Subjective thinking pattern and objective thinking pattern
Chinese culture tends to treat human beings as the subjects. Qian Muheld that “Chinese culture is with human beings as its center and is full of humanism, as its essence.”8Therefore, Chinese people prefer subjective thinking pattern. This way of thinking tends to observe, analyze and study objective things with human beings as the center of the universe. Only by understanding himself, can man understand the objective world and its working laws. This kind of thinking pattern is reflected in Chinese grammar.
On the contrary, English people tend to have objective way of thinking, which insists on the separation between man and nature and takes objective natural world as the center to observe and analyze. The ultimate goal of the English people is to understand and conquer the world. They take the objective in nature as the focus of their research, which leads to the impersonal style in English. Therefore, it is quite common for inanimate subjects to be used as the subjects in typical English sentences.
2.2.2 Concrete thinking pattern and abstract thinking pattern
Chinese way of thinking is usually marked with its concreteness. Concrete thinking requires the combination of image and meaning, which is carried out through analogy, comparison and symbolism, all of which are based on experiences and concrete images.Whenever Chinese people speak or write, they often use many examples to facilitate the understanding of listeners and readers. They are good at using concrete images or vivid language to express abstract ideas, giving the impression that their language is concrete, definite and lucid.
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Chinese characters from their origin are simple imitation of pictures. Some pictures like parts of the characters remind Chinese readers of their meanings. Wang Li 9 once indicated that, “the so-called nouns in Chinese were slightly different from their counterparts in English in that except for those used in such fields as philosophy, science, economy, politics, etc.”; “usually denote concrete, tangible things that can be sensed by the five sense faculties.” (Chen) 10
English people have a preference for abstract thinking or logical thinking. This way of thinking takes concepts, judgment and reasoning as its form and expresses ideas in a logical sequence, thus it is also called Aristotelian logical thinking. G.M.Young once indicated that the English language has an excessive reliance on the noun at the expense of the verb will, in the end, detach the mind of the writer from the realities of here and now, from when and how and in what mood the thing is done, and insensibly deduce a habit of abstraction, generalization and vagueness.
2.3 Theories of L2 Writing
In the Current-traditional Rhetoric Model, writers are provided with a discourse structure beyond sentence level and they would just follow the construction, fit sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into prescribed patterns.
The Controlled Composition Model was based on behaviorist psychology, the writer would just remember sentence patterns and imitate those sentence patterns in their own writing, and the teacher would just edit linguistic aspects with paying attention to the ideas in the composition.
Many researchers (e.g., Kroll) 11 felt that “neither Controlled Composition approach nor Current-traditional Rhetoric approach adequately fostered thought or expression.” The writer under these two approaches tried to make their texts, correct sentence patterns or passage patterns satisfy the readers, who in fact were the rater or editor.
“The process approach held that writing was a complex, recursive and creative process or a set of behaviors that was very similar in its broad outlines for the first and the second language writers.”(Kroll) 12. The writer in this approach was seen as an active creator or composer.
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Wang Wenyu13 proposed “a model of L2 writing process to show the bilingual nature of L2 writing process.” The model consisted of three parts: the task environment, the composing processor and the writer?s long-term memory. This model showed that L2 composing process was a complex non-liner bilingual behavior, in which L1 played a dominant role in the activities of process controlling, idea generating, and idea organizing, whereas L2 played a dominant role in the activities of task examining and sentence forming and all of these activities were interacted with each other instead of isolated. The world knowledge and rhetorical knowledge were mainly stored and retrieved in L1, and L2 was chiefly used to recall the linguistic knowledge.
2.4 Language Transfer
Odin 14 thought the following substratum of defined transfer applied to all subsequent discussions about language transfer: “Transfer is the target language and other languages that have been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired.” Chomsky theorized that there were underlying principles of grammar that children acquired naturally, according to which human beings produced language through a deep structure that enabled them to generate and transfer their own grammar to any other languages.
To put it simply, transfer means mother tongue influence, which takes into account the potential influence of multilingual background. Transfer is also used by educational psychologists to refer to the use of past knowledge, experience and skills in a new situation, in other words, what we learn in the first language transfers into the second language.
No matter language transfer exerts a positive influence or a negative influence on second language learning, it is just based on this analytical reasoning that this thesis sets out to clarify the influence of language transfer on second language learning.
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3. Analysis and Discussion
3.1 Introduction
As discussed in research orientation, this thesis aims to analyze the influence of Chinese culture on Chinese college students? English writing. The research is made up of three parts. The first part and the second part are the influence of Chinese culture on students? writing and a questionnaire respectively. The last part is interviews with 20 subjects to complement the data analysis. Quantitative research is empirical research where the data are in the form of numbers. Its goal is to examine variables identified and test hypotheses.
3.2 Research Methods
3.2.1 Subjects
The subjects having participated in the research are sixty-three seniors of English major in Shaanxi University of Technology. They have learned English for at least 10 years and are expected to be proficient in vocabulary, sentence and grammar. They have already taken part in the TEM4 in 2010 and TEM8 in 2012. Besides, writing courses have been given to them. 3.2.2 Data collection
The essays were students? final examination of writing in December and were collected in 2012. The students were required to write an argumentative essay in a fixed period of time. The writing should be consistent with the following requirements:
Essay type: in the argument mode on a given topic. Essay topic: Are computers a curse or a blessing?
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