基于认知因素的修辞学劝说模式及英语写作教学

VIP免费

3.0 陈辉 2024-11-19 5 4 1.88MB 84 页 15积分

侵权投诉

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, there is an increasing awareness of the upset situation concerning

English writing among college English teachers. More and more teachers come to

expose themselves to various but effective approaches to teaching writing in order to

remedy the unsatisfying teaching situation. Process and product approaches are most

commonly used in English writing teaching. However, these two approaches are

observed to represent a reaction against each other. Teachers who favor the application

of product approach to teach writing assume that students can produce good writing

once they have mastered vocabulary and sentence of the language. But in such writing

instruction, composing process skills are given relatively small role and to a certain

degree students’ motivation and interests remain undeveloped. But when applying

process approach to teach writing, more and more teachers realize the disadvantages of

this so-called “enabling” approach. The main problem is that writing instructors tend to

offer learners insufficient input, particularly in terms of meta knowledge of English

writing (e.g., how to achieve unity and coherence in a paragraph). The Conceptual

Integration theory, developed by Fauconnier and Turner, affords us an opportunity to

re-study the process of language communication and the process of rhetorical

persuasion. The networks consist of two or more input spaces structured by

information from discrete cognitive domains, a generic space that contains structure

common to all spaces in the network, and a blended space that contains selected

aspects of structure from each input space, and frequently, emergent structure of its

own. For the purpose of finding an effective model of writing instruction for students

this thesis is intended to provide an introductory rhetorical model from cognitive

perspective for teaching writing.

The thesis mainly includes four parts and answers three questions respectively. In

the first part by briefly reviewing previous literature on writing study, we try to

investigate the problem with traditional writing theories. In the second part, we outline

the basic theoretical assumptions underlying our research work. Our work draws on

cognitive theory, specifically the theory of Conceptual Integration, and tries to find the

interrelationship among cognition, conceptual integration, meaning construction and

persuasion. In the third part, we try to analyze rhetorical persuasion from the cognitive

perspective. While creating the model, we have the following assumptions about

language, rhetoric and human being in mind: Language is a trigger of human

experiences; intention and interpretation determine meaning. The last part is intended

to be an application part, which aims at testing the feasibility of rhetorical model in

writing action. In the end, some conclusions and implications are presented as well as

some suggestions for future research. It is suggested that the result of our study can be

incorporated into daily communication and benefit students who take writing courses.

Key Words: Cognition, Conceptual Integration, Rhetorical Appeal,

Writing

III

摘要

目前，写作教学在中国大学英语教学中受到越来越多的重视。教师们不断探

索有效的方法以弥补写作教学差强人意的情况。在这一过程中过程教学法和结果

教学法是最为常用的两种方法。本文回顾了大学英语写作教学的历史及流派，对

过程教学法和结果教学法各自的优缺点进行了对比分析。结果写作的观点和理论

事实上没有抓住写作的本质,只是单纯地强调最终的文本及静态地分析组成最终

文本的要素——词语、句子、语法等形式，而忽视了写作的本质。由这种理论指

导的写作教学也是偏重于表层的东西,即文章的词汇、句子及语法,训练的方法通

常是练习或者学习别人的文章；而过程写作的观点和理论则抓住了写作的本质，

但如果只注重过程，否定或者忽视最终文本及对其分析和练习的重要性,也是不够

的。因为写作的特点包括实践性,写作固然需要一定的理论知识，但是有了理论知

识并不等于有了写作能力。任何写作理论都必须经过多次的实践锻炼，才能转化

为写作能力。亚氏的修辞理论对写作过程具有指导意义，但在具体的写作过程中

该如何实现一直是困扰我们的问题。随着对修辞研究的深入，我们发现由

Fauconnier 和Turner 创建的概念整合理论对探索和解读说服过程背后的认知机制

提供了令人振奋的可能性。概念整合理论具有完整的框架结构，遵循一套完整灵

活的运作机制。它的基本运作需要四个心理空间：两个输入空间，一个类属空间

和一个整合空间。整合中两个输入空间中的成分被有选择地投射到整合空间，通

过组合、完善和阐释的过程，生成输入空间所没有的新结构，从而揭示了说服过

程的发生和发展。本文试图从认知的角度建构较为有效的修辞写作模式。

本文主要由四个部分组成，分别回答了三个问题。第一部分，简要回顾了有

关写作研究的文献资料，并在此基础上提出了在传统写作模式中所存在的问题；

第二部分，通过分析概念整合理论中认知学的起源、定义、范畴与功能等，试图

寻求认知、概念整合、语言理解及劝说之间的内部联系；第三部分，从认知角度

分析修辞劝说过程以期望能找出较为有效的说服模式；最后一部分是所提模式的

具体应用，目的是验证这一模式的实用性与有效性，与此同时也进一步阐明了该

模式的本质与特点。

关键词：认知概念整合修辞诉诸写作

ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... I

摘要......................................................................................................................... III

Chapter One Introduction ........................................................................................... 1

§1.1 A Brief Introduction .......................................................................................1

§1.2 The General Purpose and the Structure of This Study ...................................5

§1.3 The Organization of the Thesis ......................................................................5

Chapter Two Retrospect of Writing Instruction Development ................................... 7

§2.1 History of Western Writing Theory ............................................................... 7

§2.2 Schools of Writing Instruction Theories ........................................................8

§2.3 Stages of Process Approach Development .................................................. 11

§2.4 The Relationship between Rhetoric and Composition ................................ 12

Chapter Three Cognition and Conceptual Integration ..............................................15

§3.1 Cognition ..................................................................................................... 15

§3.1.1 Emergence of Cognitive Psychology ....................................................15

§3.1.2 Research Method of Cognitive Psychology ......................................... 17

§3.1.3 The Assumption of Cognitive Linguistics ............................................ 18

§3.1.4. Embodied Experience and Linguistic Meaning ...................................18

§3.1.5 The New Way to the Utterance Understanding .................................... 19

§3.2 Mental Space ............................................................................................... 20

§3.2.1 The Brief Review of Mental Space ...................................................... 20

§3.2.2 Access Principle ....................................................................................21

§3.2.3 Mappings .............................................................................................. 22

§3.3 Conceptual Integration Theory .................................................................... 23

§3.3.1 Networks of Conceptual Integration .....................................................24

§3.3.2 The Process of Conceptual Integration .................................................26

§3.3.3 The Example of Buddhist Monk ...........................................................27

§3.4 Summary ......................................................................................................28

Chapter Four A Cognition-Based Rhetorical Model in English Writing ..................29

§4.1 Psychological Models of Communication ...................................................29

§4.2 Communication from Cognitive Perspective ...............................................30

§4.3 Persuasion Process from Cognitive Perspective ..........................................32

§4.4 A Cognition-Based Rhetorical Model ..........................................................34

§4.4.1 Rhetoric in Action in Logical Dimension .............................................37

§4.4.2 Rhetoric in Action in Emotional Dimension ........................................ 42

§4.4.3 Rhetoric in Action in Ethical Dimension ..............................................48

§4.5 Summary ......................................................................................................53

Chapter Five The Application of the Model to the Teaching of Writing ..................55

§5.1 Case Study ................................................................................................... 55

§5.2 Experiment of Composition Writing ........................................................... 59

§5.2.1 Design of the Experiment ..................................................................... 59

§5.2.2 Evaluation of the Results ...................................................................... 60

§5.2.3 Discussion and Implication ...................................................................63

§5.3 Questionnaire Analysis ................................................................................ 64

§5.3.1 Procedures .............................................................................................64

§5.3.2 Results ...................................................................................................65

§5.3.3 Discussion and Implication ...................................................................65

§5.4 Summary ......................................................................................................66

Chapter Six Conclusion ............................................................................................ 69

§6.1 A Brief Summary of the Study .....................................................................69

§6.2 Implications ................................................................................................. 70

§6.3 Limitations of the Research ......................................................................... 71

§6.4 Further Research ..........................................................................................72

Appendices .................................................................................................................. 73

Appendix 1: The Scoring Rubric for Holistic Rating .......................................... 73

Appendix 2: Questionnaire .................................................................................. 74

Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 77

在读期间公开发表的论文......................................................................................... 83

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................85

Chapter One Introduction

§1.1 A Brief Introduction

With the development of technology and enhancement of communication, different

parts of the world are more and more closely connected. English as an international

language proves to be of great significance. English teaching and learning enjoy greater

popularity as China has more opportunities to interact with foreign countries.

Among all the tasks of college English teaching, writing has long been recognized

as one of the most boring and compelling tasks. It is a common phenomenon that

teachers seem helpless with the students’ poor writing ability while the students are

always complaining about the dullness of the writing course.

Prompted and enlightened by the lectures on Rhetoric and Writing during my

academic study, I pay attention to the abundant writing theories in the West, hoping

they could provide illumination on the subject. I believe the application of these theories

can make new sparks in the teaching of writing.

As English writing is such a vast topic that a thorough exploration of every aspect

is almost impossible, my study will be narrowed down to argumentation writing, which

is unavoidable in academic writing and in college students’ assignments. In fact,

making an argument—expressing a point of view on a subject and supporting it with

evidence—is often the aim of academic writing. Apart from this, arguments are

everywhere: scholars spend their lives in debating what may be counted as “true”,

“right” and “real” in their fields; ordinary people use argumentations in their daily life

to persuade other people.

In the West, Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals have already been widely researched on

and applied to English writing. Nevertheless, in our country, these theories still appear

to be fresh to most Chinese teachers and little has been done to put the theories into

writing practice. In China, many problems exist in the contemporary teaching of

English composition. The first problem is that both the teacher and students lack the

audience awareness in the composition class. A survey conducted in 1998 by my

supervisor, Deng Zhiyong, shows that about 80% of the Chinese college students have

no audience awareness. The written assignments usually focus on the sentence drills,

spelling, grammar mistakes, and are seldom oriented to an audience. In this case,

writing seems to be a written grammar class and occurs in a social vacuum. So students

are usually fostered to be grammar-sensitive while complaining about the dullness of

Cognition-Based Rhetorical Appeals and the Teaching of English Composition

writing.

Against such a neglect of social context for writing instruction, Kathleen Black

warns composition teachers: “Without genuine social context, writing loses its function

of communication and degenerates into mere exercise in which one is forced or

encouraged to engage” (Kathleen Black, 1989: 233).

Along with the traditional notion of writing is the so-called product approach,

which emphasizes that writing must be taught atomistically. In other words, students

must be taught smaller units first and then larger units and competent writers know what

they are going to say before they begin to write — thus the writers’ most important task

is to find a form into which to organize content.

Therefore, teachers tend to teach writing as a passive action. Students are seldom

taught to bear their audience in their minds. The common procedure of a composition

class is linear: the teacher gives the writing topic; the students write their compositions

and then hand them in, waiting for the graded paper back, usually with some

grammatical mistakes underlined. As a result, students begin to form a misconception

about writing little by little. Consider Linder S. Flower and John R. Hayes’s comment

on some typical teaching practices of the traditional approach:

In the mist of the composition of renaissance, an odd fact stands out: our basic methods of

teaching writing are the same one English academics were using in the 17th century. We

still undertake to teach people to write primarily by dissecting and describing a completed

piece of writing. The student is exposed to the formal descriptive categories of

rhetoric(modes of argument－definition, cause and effect, etc. and modes of discourse－

description, persuasion, etc.), offered good examples (usually professional ones) and bad

examples (usually his/her own), and encouraged to absorb the features of a socially

approved style, with emphasis on grammar and usage. We help our students analyze the

product, but we leave the process of writing up to inspiration.

(Linder S. Flower & John R. Hayes, 1977: 499)

Unfortunately, the phenomenon still exists in the teaching of English writing in

Chinese classrooms, in which the inner process of composing remains a virtually

unexplored territory.

Writers adopting this approach often view “persuasion,” with its emotional and

ethical appeals, as the center of whole persuasion. They see an arguer’s purpose as

finding and conveying “truth” rather than as moving an audience toward a point of

Chapter One Introduction

view. According to James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality ，in American Colleges

instructors posit “truth” or “reality” in the external objects which human beings

experience through the senses. They perceive writing as a record of this reality to be

reproduced for a reader. The reader plays no part in the process of meaning-making but

merely “receives” the knowledge poured into the text. Rhetoric becomes a vehicle for

communicating knowledge, not a means for its discovery. An expert, Anne Berthoff, in

The Making of Meaning gets at the crux of the problem posed by a traditionalist’s

approach to persuasion：

“Good instruction in reasoning is exceedingly rare. As for what is taught in the colleges

under the name of logic, oh dear, perhaps the less said the better. It is true that

mathematics teaches one branch of reasoning. But how few teachers understand the logic

of mathematics. And how few understand the psychology of the puzzled pupil!” (Anne

Berthoff, 1981: 27)

The problems in persuasion by formal reasoning are that it draws writers'

attentions to a mechanical matrix and intrudes upon naming and generating ideas. In

addition to impeding invention, formal argument, especially the syllogism, fuels an

inclination of immature writers to think with right/wrong simplicity. But argument is

tested by probability, not validity.

With the development of psychology and cognitive science, Conceptual

Integration theory affords us an opportunity to re-study not only the process of

language understanding, meaning construction but also the process of rhetorical

persuasion in human mind. In cognitive sciences, cognition includes processes that the

mind deals with the world and the relationship between them, thus our brain can

actively recognize the whole world. Through the activities of the mind, cognition is the

processes of organizing the experiences of the objective world and then

conceptualizing and structuralizing them. With the development of cognitive theory,

Conceptual Integration theory has been developed by Fauconnier (1997), and

Fauconnier & Turner (1998) as a general cognitive operation which is used in meaning

construction. The theory was set up to account for cases in which some of the content

of two or more mental spaces is combined to yield emergent structure. It is dynamic,

supple and active in the moment of thinking. It interacts with other general cognitive

operations. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

15 积分 4人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

IABSTRACTNowadays,thereisanincreasingawarenessoftheupsetsituationconcerningEnglishwritingamongcollegeEnglishteachers.Moreandmoreteacherscometoexposethemselvestovariousbuteffectiveapproachestoteachingwritinginordertoremedytheunsatisfyingteachingsituation.Processandproductapproachesaremostcommonlyused...

展开>> 收起<<

基于认知因素的修辞学劝说模式及英语写作教学.pdf

共84页,预览9页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

基于认知因素的修辞学劝说模式及英语写作教学

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

推荐作者

热门标签

举报选择: