Volume 42, Issue 4

Well known to students of rhetoric, classics, and the history of education, Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory also merits the attention of EFL teachers and scholars who deal with public speaking and written composition. Although created in ancient Rome 2,000 years ago, the Institutes is replete with insights that are as applicable today as in Quintilian’s time. After providing historical background on Quintilian and his masterwork, this article examines his comprehensive program of speech education, his explication of the symbiotic relationship between speech and writing, and his notion of the good person speaking (and writing) well as the ideal of ethical communication. In the process, it touches upon numerous issues germane to English language educators in China and to EFL teaching and research in general.

Rhetorical features of Chinese writers’ essays have been studied for decades but inconsistent interpretations of deduction and induction lead to controversial results. Taking a comparative rhetoric perspective, this paper clarifies the notions of deduction and induction and investigates what rhetorical features characterize Chinese expository paragraphs besides deduction and induction and whether Chinese EFL learners’ English paragraphs have similar features. Two kinds of data sources were used—29 full-score Chinese expositions in College Entrance Examinations and 29 English expositions written by Chinese EFL learners. The results show that deduction is preferred in both Chinese and EFL writing, and that rhetorical paragraphs and coordinate paragraphs are particular to Chinese writing while the EFL learners’ paragraphs display hybrid rhetoric such as semi-coordination. It is concluded that neither Chinese paragraphs nor EFL ones are similar to the modern English rhetorical paradigm, and English rhetoric instruction will facilitate the introspection of the two kinds of rhetoric.

It is widely accepted nowadays that intelligibility is the essential goal for most learners of English, and it is not necessary for them to mimic all aspects of native-speaker English in order to achieve a high level of intelligibility. However, the features that are needed in order to make oneself easily understood by listeners from elsewhere remain controversial. The current research focuses on thirteen five-minute recordings of conversations between young speakers of English in central China and an interviewer from Britain, in order to determine which features of their speech gave rise to misunderstandings. It was found that, in the 18 tokens of misunderstanding identified, 4 resulted from lexical semantics (22%), 3 from Chinese place names (17%), 3 from grammar (17%) , and 11 from pronunciation (61%) (with some tokens cross-classified). The most common phonological factors giving rise to loss of intelligibility were omission of syllables and simplification of word-initial consonant clusters.

This paper investigates developmental patterns of metadiscourse use in Chinese students’ EAP writing in an English medium university, in comparison with English majors’ EFL writing in mainstream state universities and L1 student writing in UK universities. Taking a longitudinal and cross-contextual perspective, the study explores corpora of L1 and L2 student writing gathered from three sources: EAP essays written by Chinese undergraduate students at an English Medium Instruction (EMI) university; argumentative essays written by English majors in the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL); and academic essays of English L1 students from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. Hyland’s (2005a) model of metadiscourse was adopted to identify interactive and interactional devices in each corpus, and results were compared between different levels as well as across the corpora to reveal developmental features. Findings show marked differences in metadiscourse use between Chinese EMI students’ EAP essays and English major students’ EFL essays in mainstream state universities, whereas a similar pattern of use occurred in EAP essays and English L1 student academic essays. Significant changes were also found between different year levels in two L2 essay corpora. The findings suggest that metadiscourse use in L2 writing had developmental trajectories distinctive to different institutional contexts, with EAP instruction in the EMI institution having mixed effects on Chinese students’ awareness and use of metadiscourse in essay writing.

Based on self-established corpora, the study systematically explores structural and functional similarities and differences of four-word lexical bundles in native and Chinese writers’ English abstracts both in chemistry and linguistics from the interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary viewpoint. The results show that disciplinary features are found in the use of lexical bundles. Besides, most bundle differences found in abstracts by English native writers are also found in those written by Chinese scholars, indicating that Chinese scholars have developed an awareness of their discipline. In addition, both structurally and functionally, the lexical bundles in Chinese writers’ abstracts are similar to those of native writers in linguistics while divergent in chemistry.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of rubric-referenced student self-assessment (SSA) on students’ English essay writing by employing a two-group pre-post-quasi-experimental research design. The method was tested on 54 students at a Chinese university. During a 17-week experiment, the experimental group (EG) received the rubric and annotated samples, while the comparison group (CG) received only the rubric in self-assessment. Data sources included students’ scores in the pre-test and post-test and interviews. Quantitative findings indicated that the EG made significantly stronger progress than the CG in the post-test. Interview results suggested that annotation-based rubric-referenced SSA can help students understand the task requirements, initiate their self-regulatory behaviors, and improve their self-assessment confidence, although students still wanted to receive assistance from teachers partly due to the Confucian-heritage culture settings in China. The findings are discussed in terms of the design features of sample annotations within the framework of self-regulated learning (SRL), as well as the implications of using this method in the classroom.

Based on concepts of horizon of expectation and indeterminacy in reception theory, this paper reports a comparative analysis of Chang Hen Ge , a narrative poem written by Chinese poet Bai Juyi in the Tang Dynasty, and its English translations by William John Bainbrigge Fletcher, Herbert Allen Giles, Xu Yuanchong as well as Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Results are as follows: 1) Xu’s translation is the best in that he adds annotations and combines literal and free translations so as to explicate cultural connotations and underlying implications of images while meeting and broadening target readers’ horizon of expectation. In addition, he tries to replicate figurative characteristics and transform rhetorical techniques of original cultural images to retain the source text’s indeterminacy and aesthetic value and to provide target readers with intense aesthetic experience. 2) There are inappropriate and inaccurate translations of cultural images in all the four English translations, and they are caused by differences in ethnic history, religious belief, mode of thinking, features of English and Chinese as well as the subjectivity of translators.