Writing Tasks and Learners’ Textual Theme Choices: An Analysis of First-year Non‑English Majors’ Routine English Writing

Abstract

This study is designed to analyze the use of Textual Themes in three different writing tasks, namely Dos and Don’ts in China, A Movie Review, and Introducing a Hotel. The data consist of 24 English compositions written by first-year non-English majors at a university in Guangdong Province. Adopting a mixed-method approach, the study uses UAM CorpusTool 6 to annotate Textual Themes and their subtypes. Then SPSS 27.0.1 is used to conduct descriptive statistical analysis and one-way ANOVA on the Textual Theme Ratio across the three tasks. Representative sentences are further discussed to illustrate the functions of different Textual Themes in different writing tasks. The results reveal a statistically significant difference in Textual Theme Ratio between Dos and Don’ts in China and Introducing a Hotel. In addition, Contextualising and Addition are subtypes frequently used across all three tasks, whereas different tendencies are observed in the use of Consequence, Adversative, Concessive, and Sequencing. To some extent, these differences are associated with the communicative purposes and discourse requirements of the writing tasks. The findings of this study may serve as an exploration for future research with larger corpus and more clearly differentiated genres.