论文总字数：24211字

摘 要

本研究是旨在对语用预设理论对学习者英语写作水平的影响进行的调查。具体来说，本研究主要对相同水平英语学习者习得语用预设后的作文得分情况进行比较分析，以期使外语学习者认识并发挥语用预设理论在二语习得的写作方面的积极作用，由此围绕两个基本问题展开讨论：

1. 客观上，已习得语用预设理论的学生的英语写作得分是否有显著提高？

2. 自我测评时，受试者是否认为语用预设理论使他们的写作技巧受益，具体是哪些方面？

在本研究中，受试者是70位来自普通一本大学的英语专业两个不同班级的大三学生，英语水平无显著差异。首先，为衡量受试者习得语用预设理论之前的英语写作水准，本研究采集了这70位受试者在大二学年参加的大学英语六级考试的写作得分（这部分的满分为107分）。选用大学英语六级考试写作得分作为数据来源之一的原因，一方面在于其考试时间距离大三学生习得语用预设理论的时间较近，另一方面也在于其数据的有效性、可信性和可操作性对本研究都非常具有参考价值。另一数据来源是受试者在大三学年第二学期的写作课期末考试成绩，由于英语专业学生的特殊性，此阶段的受试者已在写作课和语言学课程中学习过具体的语用预设理论。本研究中SPSS软件包用来计算所有的数据，所采集的数据用独立样本t-检验。先通过统计样本图大致观察个体在不同时期的写作得分差异走向，接着用t-检验分析两个班受试者的作文平均分走向，通过采集两组数据并比较分析结果表明，已习得语用预设理论的学生的英语写作得分确有显著提高。再次，作者利用自我评估问卷调查学生习得语用预设理论是否使他们的写作技巧受益，具体为写作内容相关度、充分性，上下文组织连贯性和语言素养等方面的问题。

实验结果表明，学习语用预设知识后，外语学习者的写作得分确实得到了显著提高，其进步的原因可大致归纳为以下几方面：（1）学习语用预设知识使学生行文的逻辑性更强，更具有连贯性；（2）运用语用预设理论写作使学生更多地考

虑到读者的需要或出题人的意图，从而使写作内容更具有效性和充分性；（3）语用预设理论作为语用学的重要一环，习得后显著提高了学生的语言素养。本研究的结论是习得语用预设理论知识对外语学习者的写作水平确有积极影响，该结论有以下两方面重要启示：为英语写作的教授和教材编写提供了参考性；为学生认识写作过程提供了一个多边角度，对提高写作能力有很大的帮助。

关键词：语用预设；英语写作；影响；自我测评

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………..ii

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….....

中文摘要……………………………………………………………………………….

Chapter One INTRODUCTION………………………………………………….1

1.1 Need for the study...............................................................................................1

1.2 Research content...………………………..............................................1

Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW….................................................................3

2. 1 The philosophical background and development of presupposition...................3

2. 2 Properties and roles of presupposition................................................................4

2. 3 Related studies about pragmatic presupposition in writing…………………....5

Chapter Three METHODOLOGY….......................................................................6

3.1 Research questions……………………………………………………………...6

3.2 Subjects………………………………………………………………………....6

3.3 Data collection…………………………………………………………………..7

3.4 Data analysis methods………………………………………………………......8

Chapter Four RESULTS and DISCUSSION........................................................9

4.1 Effects of pragmatic presupposition on EFL learners’ writing scores..................9

4.2 Benefits of pragmatic presupposition with students’ writing skills...................10

Chapter Five CONCLUSION.................................................................................11

References…………................................................................……………………12Appendix…………………………………………………………………………..13

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

This study aims to study the effects of pragmatic presupposition on EFL learners’ writing. This chapter focuses on presenting the general background of the current study, the need of the study and the purpose of the study.

1.1 Need for the Study

Presupposition has been a significant topic in linguistics, and writing is a crucial measure of students’ English level. Therefore, plenty of studies about pragmatic presupposition in writing have been done. Instructors and learners have attempted to find out the relationship between these two.

However, there are a lot of difficulties and gaps in either EFL learners’ writing or pragmatic presupposition, which is actually the case. For example, the present studies made by linguists mostly focus on establishing theoretical models for pragmatic presupposition, rather than practical application. Besides, they usually directed its effects on the teaching of writing, seldom on the students themselves. As the rising and heating status of pragmatic presupposition in English writing, it is urgent to explore the effects of pragmatic presupposition on EFL learners’ writing.

1.2 Research Content

In this thesis, a study which is related to how pragmatic presupposition affect English writing will be conducted. In addition, it provides some ideas for teachers and students on how necessarily and significantly pragmatic presupposition should be presented on writing course. Also the author tries to fill up the gaps mentioned in the need for study. In this essay, these two questions will be answered:

1. Objectively, is there any significant effect in improving students’ writing scores if they learned pragmatic presupposition?
2. When doing self-assessment, does pragmatic presupposition benefit the students’ writing skills?

Chapter Two

LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, the literature review and theoretical framework consists of three sections. Section 2.1 introduces the philosophical background and the development of presupposition briefly. Section 2.2 mainly reviews the characteristic analysis of presupposition and the triggers at lexical and syntactic level, also gives explanation in detail about the important roles of pragmatic presupposition in writing. Section 2.3 looks back to research discovery about pragmatic presupposition in writing and points out the gaps, which lays theoretical background for the following experiment.

2.1 The Philosophical Background and Development of Presupposition

Presupposition, which refers to the inferences about what are assumed to be true in the utterance rather than directly asserted too be true, can be divided into semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition, and each of them have their own application. This dissertation mainly discusses the functions of pragmatic presupposition in English writing. As an experiential basis and secondary condition, pragmatic presupposition plays an important role in writing.

About one hundred year ago, Gottlob Frege (1892), who was known as the German philosopher, logician, and mathematician, firstly raised presupposition as a philosophical term in his book named On Sense and Reference. In his production, he stated that any sentence proposition exists an obvious presupposition, meanwhile, the pronouns used in the sentence have references. After Frege, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1905) and Peter Strawson (1952) made researches from the perspective of semantic presupposition, which pushed the study of presupposition into a new stage. As a result, it no longer belonged to the field of philosophical research, but a linguistic research. When it comes to the1970s, with the development of semantics, Noam Chomsky (1971) proposed the analysis of presupposition and the focus with his “Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpretation”.

2.2 Properties and Roles of Presupposition

The features of presupposition can be generally summarized by two aspects. On the one hand, the linguist He Ziran (1997) states appropriateness and common ground in his book Contemporary Pragmatics. On the other hand, another linguist Chen Xinren (1998) states unidirectionality, subjectivity and concealing in his book A Survey of Pragmatics.

Then, what about presupposition triggers? Presupposition is triggered by definite descriptions: the simple or compound proper names and temporal clauses, and is soon extended to all kinds of other syntactic structures (Keenan, 1971; Karttunen, 1973) and lexical items (Kiparsky, 1970; Fillmore, 1971a).

The roles of pragmatic presupposition in writing can be generally summarized by three items based on definitions and properties of pragmatic presupposition. Firstly, it makes the text more coherent and logical when served as a linking device between the very sentence and the forthcoming one or the previous one. Secondly, considered as information structure, it conduces to make the information more informative and continuous, so that the macrostructure of a discourse can be organized better. Thirdly, it is a necessary aspect of writing which makes effort effectively in both expressing and understanding sentence meanings.

2.3 Related Studies about Pragmatic Presupposition in Writing

Presupposition has been a significant topic in linguistics, and writing is a crucial measure of students’ English level. Therefore, plenty of researches about pragmatic presupposition in writing teaching have been done. For instance, EFL teachers from Jilin University used product approach and process approach to prove that pragmatic presupposition play a facilitating role on teaching English writing. Besides, according to Ellis, Rod (1994), The Study of Second Language Acquisition, the technology of error analysis has been made good use of by teachers in an informal and intuitive way. Whereas these studies usually drew lessons from the theories of domestic and foreign linguists and scholars, including the theories of Leech, Levinson, Miao Xingwei, Zhang Keding, and Zhu Yongsheng etc.

There are two aspects of the gaps in pragmatic presupposition discovery: The present studies made by linguists mostly focus on establishing theoretical models for pragmatic presupposition, rather than practical application. Besides, they usually directed its effects on the teaching of writing, seldom on the students themselves. This paper is trying to fill up these gaps and provide some suggestions.

Chapter Three

METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, research questions, data preparation and the methods are presented. According to EFL learners’ writing test with different tasks, people would better understand the effective way pragmatic presupposition offered for EFL learners’ writing. In order to achieve this purpose, the following procedures had been adopted.

3.1 Research Questions

Taking the research gaps mentioned in the literature review into account, this study would answer the following questions:

1. Is there any significant effect in improving students’ writing scores if they learned pragmatic presupposition?

2. When doing self-assessment, does pragmatic presupposition benefit the students’ writing skills?

3.2 Subjects

The current study’s subjects involve two classes consisting of 70 students of third-year English majors. They are all Chinese speakers, around 20 years old and have learned English mainly in the classroom following teachers’ instructions. All participants are university students.

3.3 Data Collection

There are three data collection instruments in this study:

Firstly, in order to measure the subjects’ English writing proficiency before they learned pragmatic presupposition, the scores of CET-6 writing in sophomore year were used. (The total score of CET-6 writing is 107.) The reason for choosing the material from CET-6 lies in the validity, reliability and practicality of CET-6.

Secondly, the research needs the score of subjects’ writing course in the second semester junior’s final exam. These two parts’ data were taken from two classes’ students majored in English. Due to the particularity of English majors, it is known that students learned pragmatic presupposition theory in linguistic course in junior year. Therefore, the first question mentioned in the 3.1 part can be solved by comparing these two sets of data.

Thirdly, as for the second question raised in the 3.1 part, the study used a self-assessment questionnaire to complete. The subjects need to answer the question about whether they have improved writing skills by learning pragmatic presupposition on the questionnaire, such as content relevance, coherence, organization, language quality, etc. The study chose these standards because pragmatic presupposition emphasizes on logicality, as concrete representations of logicality in writing are content organization, coherence, relevance, and so on. (For details, see the appendix.)

3.4 Data Analysis Methods

To do the calculations, the research used the SPSS procedure, and to analyze the collected data, independent samples t-text was involved. To begin with, the statistical sample figure is used to observe the trend of individually writing scores’ differences in different periods. Meanwhile, t-text is used to analyze the trend of average scores.

Chapter Four

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

This chapter is made up of two parts. The first part reports the major findings of the study. The second part interprets and discusses the major findings.

4.1 Effects of Pragmatic Presupposition on EFL Learners’ Writing Scores

The major findings are presented as follows: Chart 4.1.1, Chart 4.1.2

请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：24211字