Helping Student Develop Argumentative Writing Skills through Rich Feature Analysis

The primary concern of this paper is to address the issue of discrepancies between teachers intuitively defined stronger and weaker student argumentative writings.There exists a problem in Chinese university EFL writing classrooms that the teachers’remarks on student compositions are often found to be rather vague or even unhelpful.Remarks such as Needs further amendment and You wrote just like the way you speak cannot supply students with explicit reasons of what is really needed for their writing improvement.Affirming the dialectal view on text-context relationship held by Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG),the theoretical propositions of Rich Feature Analysis(Barton,2004) are contended to a sound solution to the problem proposed by this paper.To demonstrate its feasibility,the paper followed the gist of Rich Feature Analysis to analyze a corpus of four argumentative writings on same topics.The paper consolidates "the spoken-written continuum"(Barton,2004,p.64),and concludes stronger argumentative writings should own at least one of the following properties: product-like,condensed,recursive,coherent,distanced,and open to scrutiny.The absence of lexical density and nominalization constitutes the main reason for writing deficiencies by tertiary students.The implications for learning the register of schooling are discussed.