A STUDY OF ENGLISH PARAGRAPH DEVELOPMENT PATTERNS OF CHINESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

ABSTRACT

A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic. Paragraphs can be seen as being rather like the bricks in a wall. They are all interdependent but they are also independent units. They support each other but they have their own character. Every paragraph will have its own focus and this will be different from that of any other paragraph in an essay.  Learning to write good paragraphs will help an author to stay on track during drafting and revision stages. Good paragraphing also greatly assists readers in following a piece of writing. Fantastic ideas, if not presented in an organized way, will fail to attract readers.
English paragraph writing has always been an important issue for Chinese students. Various studies have been done to probe into the characteristics and problems of English paragraph writing of Chinese students. However, quantitative case studies on paragraph development patterns in this field are rarely seen. This paper intends to conduct a qualitative and quantitative study of 45 English essays of Chinese freshmen students. From the perspective of paragraph development, this research aims at discovering the main features of paragraph development patterns used by Chinese students by means of statistical data and detailed analysis.
Through the study, it is found that the most commonly used paragraph development patterns include deduction, examples and cause and effect. Also, the hybridized development pattern is common for Chinese students. Meanwhile, from the use of development, we found certain problems existing in the essays such as lack of sufficient reasoning and explanation, lack of detailed examples and messy logic. Based on the data and results, suggestions are offered to improve the paragraph development skills of Chinese students.

Keywords: English paragraph writing, development pattern, Chinese university students