Pragmatic coherence in the English writing of Chinese college students

Pragmatic coherence in the English writing of Chinese college students＊　

WANG Sheng-li

(School of Foreign Studies, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou 450002, China)

Abstract: An integrated coherence should be demonstrated in the aspects of syntax, semantics, register and pragmatics. On the basis of the relationship between text and pragmatic coherence, and between writing and pragmatic coherence, the paper analyzes the necessity of pragmatic coherence in writing, explores the conditions and strategies of the realization of pragmatic coherence, and applies them to college students’ compositions to help them write fluently and naturally.

Key words: English writing; coherence; pragmatic

1. Introduction

After years of study, Chinese learners are capable of writing an English composition with few grammatical or spelling mistakes, but the overall coherence is still not satisfactory. According to L I Ying-chao and ZHANG Wen-peng, lacking coherence is one of the major weaknesses in Chinese students’writing (LI & Z HANG, 2003). ZHANG Rui-jun (2003) observes that due to lack of awareness of textual coherence, Chinese students’English writing is featured as high frequency of repeating one single sentence pattern, loose structure, and inadequacy to express the author’s real intention. At the same time, our traditional teaching methodology of writing is also to blame, for it emphasizes linguistic mistakes instead of cultivation of students’skills in establishing texture in writing (LI & ZHANG, 2003). Along with the increasingly important status of writing, as one aspect of communicative competence, the problem of enhancing coherence in Chinese English learners’English writing has become more and more prominent.

Concerning coherent writing, the contention of a hundred schools of thought and the difficult condition of teaching and learning practice set me into thinking about the possibility of applying different theories of coherence, especially pragmatic coherence to practice. This paper argues only in this way can we have a full picture of coherence in writing, and propose more complete and feasible strategies for cultivating the students’awareness of textual coherence and improving the quality of their English writing. This thesis aims to propose effective ways for enhancing pragmatic coherence in Chinese English learners’writing by combining the theories about pragmatic coherence with writing practice.

2. Writing and pragmatic coherence

Text, writing and coherence are inherently related with each other. As a basic channel of communication, writing is to produce a text in order to fulfill certain communicative purpose. As coherence is an essential

*This research is financed by the Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Henan Province (No. 2005CYY004) and by the Project of Soft Science in Henan Province (No. 0724********).

WANG Sheng-li (1970- ), male, Ph.D. candidate of College of English Language and Literature, Shanghai International Studies University, visiting scholar of English Department of Peking University, associate professor and vice dean of Foreign Languages Department, School of Foreign Studies, Henan Agricultural University; research fields: applied linguistics, contrastive linguistics.

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characteristic of text, coherence is also of great value to writing. Coherence needs to be maintained if communication is to be successful. Quite o ften a failure to properly deal with textual coherence results in an ambiguous or even unintelligible writing. Coherent writing means that all the ideas in a paragraph flow smoothly from one sentence to the next. With coherence, the reader has an easy time understanding the ideas that you wish to convey.

In the writing section of College English Test Band Six (CET-6), one of the most widely acknowledged English tests in China, test takers are required to “write a short article of 150 words under the specified title or instruction, with coherent contents, without serious grammatical mistakes”. From the standard of perfection for the writing tasks in CET-6, we can see that along with a higher and higher degree of coherence in the standard of perfection “disorganized language?poor coherence?barely coherent?coherent?relatively good coherence”, the score increases accordingly. It is evident that coherence has become an important criterion for writing evaluation and a challenging goal for a writer to attain. The important status of coherence in writing provides a solid theoretical foundation for coherence studies in writing.

With regard to researches on coherent writing, one merit of the studies conducted abroad is to explore in a full way the relationship between cohesion and the quality of writing and to testify that the former determines the latter. Foreign studies also suggest that cohesion should be only one aspect of coherence. Domestic studies shed light on the features of textual cohesion and types of cohesive errors in Chinese English learners’writing, and make the conclusion that Chinese English learners’limited knowledge of cohesion leads to the low quality of their compositions. However, both domestic and foreign studies overemphasize cohesion, which is only coherence at the syntactic level, without further exploring pragmatic coherence in writing. The major reason for the focus on cohesion in writing is that most of the researchers based their studies on the widely acknowledged theory of cohesion suggested by Halliday and Hasan, who almost made no difference between cohesion and coherence.

Pioneers made a beneficial exploration into coherent writing from different levels, but their discoveries are still not satisfactory enough to provide any substantial help for our students, especially from the angle of pragmatics. Therefore, we can see that the study on the concept of coherence and that on coherent writing are incommensurate, for the former is much more mature than the latter. The concept of coherence has been discussed from pragmatic level, leading to a relatively thorough and profound general understanding of pragmatic coherence. In contrast, the study of coherent writing lags behind, in that both foreign and domestic scholars confine their research to coherence at syntactic level. This prevents further development in the study of teaching and learning of English writing. As a result, enlightened by the study of theoretical coherence, we would adopt a pragmatic view of coherence in writing, and take it as a pragmatic coherence.

3. Realization of a pragmatic coherence in text

Realization of pragmatic coherence depends on the reader’s mastery of contextual information and pragmatic knowledge. Although pragmatic coherence is coherence in the readers’perspective, it is still up to the writer to produce text to be perceived so. Thus, on the part of the writer, in order to produce text with pragmatic coherence, he should manipulate contextual information and pragmatic knowledge in suc h a way that even if there are missing links on the surface text, the reader can still decode the text as coherent. To be specific, the writer should: (1) make sure that the implied contextual information is known to the reader, otherwise it should be told explicitly in text; (2) make sure that the illocutionary act and the “conversational implicature”of the whole text serve his

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communicative purpose, and the text conforms to conventions of language use.

Textual coherence includes two aspects: coherence i n side text and coherence between text and context. Strictly speaking, interior coherence alone is incomplete, for the meanings realized by contextual factors are not taken into consideration, leading to gaps in the entire meaning (ZHANG De-lu, 2003, p. 83). As a result, in actual communication, the addressee needs to resort to the context from time to time in order to understand the text as coherent.

Context is the total environment in which a text unfolds, and it goes beyond what is said or written. Malinowski introduced two notions that he called the context of situation and the context of culture: and both of these, he argued, were necessary for the adequate understanding of a text. By context of situation, he meant the immediate environment in which the text unfolded; by context of culture, he meant the whole cultural history behind the immediate context of situation (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, p. 7). Both context of situation and context of culture play a part in the interpretation of the meanings of a text. HU Zhuang-lin (1994, p. 182) developed Malinowski’s viewpoint by suggesting that the concept “context”should be used with three connotations: linguistic context or co-text, which refers to the interior environment of text; situational context, which refers to the surrounding condition, the time, the place, and the manner of the text, the nature of the event, and the relationship between the participants; and cultural context, which refers to the history, the culture, and the customs of the language community the writer himself belongs to, and understandable to everybody from the same language community. All of them help the reader understand the meaning and the communicative purpose of the text, so as to interpret the text as coherent. Z HANG De-lu (2003, pp. 84-86) classified contextual meanings similarly into meanings of presupposition, meanings of situational context, and common knowledge of communication participants.

In the process of retrieving “missing links”, apart from contextual information, the reader also needs pragmatic knowledge to realize pragmatic inference. Pragmatic knowledge consists of communicative principles and conventions of language use. And typical communicative principles include Speech Act Theory and Cooperative Principle (CP).

Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) are among the first to make a difference between “sentence meaning”and “utterance meaning”. Sentence meaning is the surface meaning of the sentence, while utterance meaning is the real intention of the speaker. They further put forward Speech Act Theory, the main point of which is that people always purposefully perform certain acts through language. The speaker respectively performs a locutionary act when he undertakes a communicative activity, an illocutionary act when he intends the hearer to realize his real intention, and a perlocutionary act when what he says has a consequence on the hearer.

Grice (1975) argued that to make conversation move on smoothly, the participants should cooperate with each other to make themselves understood. For this reason, both of them should observe some basic principles. Grice adopted a dialectic view toward the function of cooperative principles, in that he not only believed that conversation participants nearly always observed the CP, but also admitted that they often flouted the CP purposefully, giving rise to “conversational implicature”. When conversation participants violate the CP, the surface meaning of conversation will become incoherent. However, if the addressee has the knowledge o f CP, he will naturally take the flouting as an indirect way of expressing and infer the conversational implicature, which is the addresser’s real intention. In this way, the addressee will still perceive the conversation as coherent. The process of working out the conversational implicature is actually the process of establishing pragmatic coherence by means of communicative principles. The CP can also be applied to a whole written text. Thus, if there is

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violation of the CP at the text level, pragmatic coherence depends on the condition whether the aroused “conversational implicature”of the whole text serves the writer’s purpose of communication.

However, Speech Act Theory and CP after all have more inspiration for understanding a text than for writing a text, and for understanding conversational exchange than for understanding written discourse. In contrast, Widdowson adopted a pragmatic approach to the coherence involved in nearly every kind of discourse. Widdowson regarded coherence as the relationship between illocutionary acts. According to him, a discourse with pragmatic coherence will be the one which can most readily be processed by the reader as a combination of illocutionary acts which constitutes an appropriate unit of communication, such as a description, a technical report, a legal brief, an explanation, and so on.

4. Strategies for realizing a pragmatic coherence in writing

The above theoretical discussion on the conditions for realizing a pragmatic coherence in text is revealing, but too abstract to serve as guidance for our writing practice. Thus, it is necessary to concretize the abstract conditions into workable strategies, which are believed to have more inspiration for producing coherent writing.

The general strategy is that when we put pen to paper or revise the drafts, we should always create coherence with consideration from the pragmatic coherence. We are also expected to employ strategies that are particular to pragmatic coherence, to which the rest of this thesis will be devoted.

Our study is confined to Chinese college students’English writing. As their mother tongue usually serves as the language of instruction in education and communication, learners attempt to transfer the features of their mother tongue to the English language. When the two languages are different in structures, negative transfer or interference would occur and results in errors (Lado, 1957).

It cannot be denied that coherence in English and Chinese differs both in degree and in form. With an analytic and reasoning mind, English people attach more importance to coherence. As far as form of coherence is concerned, English differs from Chinese at nearly every level of coherence. However, Chinese learners’writing in English is always produced through a process of C hinese way of thinking and Chinese-English translation (ZHANG Rui-jun, 2003). Thus, the following strategies involve a contrastive analysis of the English and Chinese language and avoidance of the possible negative transfer from Chinese in English writing.

4.1 Recognition of the reader’s identity

In writing, in order to produce text with adequate contextual information, the writer is expected to judge whether the reader is familiar with the culture and the times in his writing. Let’s take “Blood, sweat and tears”for example:

On Friday evening last I received from His Majesty the mission to form a new administration. It was the evident will of Parliament and the nation that this should be conceived on the broadest possible basis and that it should include all parties.

I have already completed the most important part of this task. A war cabinet has been formed of five members,

representing, with the Labor, Opposition and Liberals, the unity of the nation.

(“Blood, sweat and tears”Winston Churchill, May 13, 1940)

As part of the famous public speech “Blood, sweat and tears”delivered by Winston Churchill in 1940, this passage is not equally coherent for everyone, because particular contextual information is needed to retrieve such missing links as, who is “His Majesty”and what is “Parliament”about. The passage is coherent only for the author’s British contemporaries who share the same culture and live in the same era as the author, or those who

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have enough knowledge of World War II, for they bridge the gaps in meaning either with information from their context or with their pre-knowledge. However, the same passage may not be coherent for Chinese and even modern Englishmen without much historical and cultural knowledge, so the author had b etter make the implied meanings explicit for them.

Thus, in writing, it is sensible for Chinese English learners to find out before writing the reader’s identity, including cultural background, life background and level of knowledge. If the reader comes from a different culture, the author should avoid making his writing excessively loaded with Chinese culture. On the contrary, if the reader is judged to be a native person, the author should avoid spoiling his writing as a result of blindly seeking exoticism.

4.2 Acquaintance with language conventions

To produce text with pragmatic coherence, apart from providing enough contextual information, the students should also make the language conform to normal language use, and keep the sequence of illocutionary acts in accordance with known conventions.

The inspiration for teaching methodology is that the students should be taught all the necessary knowledge, including both knowledge of the world and knowledge of the language, the latter of which includes both the general interpretative strategies the reader brings to bear for making sense of text and the strategies for the writer to produce various types of discourses. The general interpretative strategies may be: assume that the writer has something informative to convey; assume that if one thing is said after another the two things are related in some way; assume that something expressed in a subordinate sentence is intended to be less prominent than something expressed in a main clause, and so on. As for the strategies for production, the students should master both how language in general works and how a particular kind of discourse works, so as to make their discourse representative of normal language use. The general knowledge of language use includes the ways of carrying out various conducts, how interactions are managed, and basic assumptions upon which communication crucially depends, which may be, for example, meanings are not explicitly stated in sentences but have to be inferred. The more specific knowledge associated with particular kinds of discourse may be certain common patterns of discourse development, from question/answer sequences, to simple narrative sequences, to factual accounts, and later to the writing up of experiments, and so on.

Generally, teachers should teach English as a means of communication, so that students could use the language as if in a real situation and thus pragmatic coherence in writing is achieved.

5. Pragmatic coherence in the English writing of Chinese college students

The idea of pragmatic coherence can be applied to the English writing, as both manifestation of the process of its practical use and confirmation of its effect in producing coherent writing. The author collected college students’English compositions of the same topic“It Pays to Be Honest”. The compositions manifest the typical syndrome of incoherence, in that the information flow is not smooth and the reader has difficulty in understanding the ideas that the author intends to express. Now the following are two compositions to make a comparison.

(1) With the development of modern economic and industry, competitive is becoming more and more obvious. At

the same time, the performance of dishonest is becoming more and more clearly.

Nowadays, there are many dishonest performances in our society. For example, some people found that he saled goods had past the perservation date. Not throw them away, they revised the perservation date, and saled them again after several days. Another case in the point, a pair of shoes was made from goat. However, in order to sale at a high price, the

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salers would say they were made from cow which has good quality.

From the foregoing, we can see that dishonest does not only harm to yourselves but also harm to others. And it is no use only realise the harmness of dishonest. We should be honest from now on and be honest in our daily life. It is only that people all over the world are honest then our country will be beautiful and wealthy.

(2) Although honesty is believed to be a virtue, there are still, dishonest people in our society. For example, some

businessmen sell fake product to their consumers; some students cheat in the exams.

Dishonest people are short-sighted. Those who sell fake products may make money at first, but consumers won’t buy their products any more. As a result, they will lose their fortune or even be sent to prison. By contrast, honest people gain

a lot. Those who always tell truth or keep to their promise not only let others trust them but gain respect from other

people as well. Such persons are sure to have a lot of good friends. Because they are trustable and respectable, everyone is eager to make friends with them. Besides, it is easier for a person with a good record to get a good job. Generally speaking, every employer wants his employees to be honest. So we can say that anyone who is honest will be paid back later.

In a word, honesty wins trust, respect and honour. So it is important that we should be honest.

After checking, we find that the second writing is much better than the first one. The major problem of the first composition lies in lack of pragmatic coherence. With examination from every aspect of a pragmatic coherence, all the incoherent compositions are successfully made into coherent ones, from which the syndrome of incoherence is removed.

6. Conclusion

When coherence is realized through the interplay of contextual information and pragmatic knowledge at the pragmatic level of text, it is called pragmatic coherence. We achieve pragmatic coherence by providing enough contextual information, making the illocutionary act and the “conversational implicature”of the whole writing serve our communicative purpose, and keeping the writing in accordance with conventions of language use.

Since English and Chinese differ from each other in many ways, it is necessary to incorporate the differences as an indispensable part of the discussion. As a result, the strategies for realizing a pragmatic coherence in Chinese English learners’English writing consist of, for the most part, avoidance of negative transfer from Chinese in the application of cohesive devices and generic structures. To be more specific, to realize pragmatic coherence, we should provide adequate contextual information by recognizing the reader’s identity and conform to conventions of language use by employing interpretive and productive strategies.

Finally, the application of pragmatic coherence to revision of Chinese students’incoherent English writing confirms that production of coherent writing involves consideration from the pragmatic aspect, and inadequacy in any aspect would lead to incoherent writing.

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(Edited by Doris and Jessica)

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