Understanding textual meaning-making in Chinese high school EFL learners’ writing

A systemic functional perspective

Bibliographic Data

ID21458407
AuthorsWinfred Wenhui Xuan (0000-0002-2916-7432, Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Dongbing Zhang (0000-0003-4295-2555, University of International Business and Economics)
Year2023
Volume46
Issue1
Pages29-53
Publication date2023-03-30
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Review of Applied Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0155-0640 • E-ISSN: 1833-7139
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/aral.20045.xua
OpenAlexW3187603358
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited28

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students’ writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to gain a holistic understanding of the organization of information in student writing, the analytical framework of Theme at three levels – that is, clause, paragraph, and text – from Derewianka and Jones (2010) was adopted. Findings show that the students have varying degrees of control over information organization at different levels. In particular, the students are not proficient in organizing information at the paragraph level. Findings also show that registerial differences affect the organization of information. The study provides relevant pedagogical implications and recommendations for this group of learners

Linguistics · Mathematics education · Paragraph · Pedagogy · World Wide Web · Communication · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Psychology · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Artificial Intelligence

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