Abstracts of Major Papers in This Issue

The Narrative Functions of the Present Tense in Fiction: WithTheStoneDiariesas a Case Study, by HU Quansheng, p. 1

TakingTheStoneDiariesas a case study, this article tries to analyze the narrative functions of the present tense in fiction. It argues that the employment of the present tense in fiction helps the reader to read the novel as a fictional autobiography in form of diary in particular, and in general serves to attract the reader to the fascinating immediacy of the narration and direct him/her to the mind of a character as the present tense often suggests “a direct link with a character’s mind”.

Power over Life and Right of Death: On the Power Relations inMrs.Dalloway, by CHEN Runping, p. 9

Mrs.Dallowaypresents the human nature in reality which is manifested in the struggles of some specific power relations such as those between heterosexuality and homosexuality concerning love and marriage, and those between reason and madness in relation to the external and internal world of the characters. The fates of Septimus and Clarissa are coherently alike. Through the Foucauldian analysis of the power relations in this novel, this paper reveals both the impact of the war on common people and the degeneration of human nature.

Martin on Interdisciplinarity, by ZHANG Delu and QIN Shuanghua, p. 13

The article is intended to introduce and comment on Martin’s lecture on interdisciplinarity at the School of Foreign Languages, Tongji University on April 11, 2010. It first introduces the three issues in interdisciplinary study: interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity, the stages of development in interdisciplinary dialogue and complementarity in interdisciplinary study, and then expounds and comments on them in a more detailed way. In interdisciplinary study, Martin firstly poses several questions in interdisciplinary study, and secondly shows the achievements made in the interdisciplinary study between systemic functional linguistics and Bernstein’s educational sociology. Thirdly, he presents his opinion on determining the sub-disciplines in linguistics, and shows the process and achievements in the cooperation between systemic functional linguistics and Bernstein’s educational sociology, highlighting the complementarity between the two.

The Role of Periodicity in Realizing the Goal of English Editorials, by ZHAO Min, p. 17

This paper is intended to explore the role of periodicity in realizing English editorials’ goals within the framework of the Systemic Functional Linguistics. The paper selects two newspapers’ editorials which make comments on the same issue, and it conducts a detailed analysis of the periodicity patterns of the selected editorial texts. It is found that different patterns of periodicity have great influences on realizing different editorials’ goals. This paper concludes that periodicity plays a substantial role in realizing discourse goals of English editorials.

A Study of the Sources of Attitude inTheSightofFather’sBackand the Related Translation, by JIANG Ping and WANG Linlin, p. 23

By employing the Attitude system under Appraisal Theory, this paper analyzes and compares the sources of Attitude inTheSightofFather’sBackwith their translation in two different English versions, and attempts to assess the quality of translation from this perspective. It is found that the Attitude system is of help in assessing the translations’ rendering of attitude meaning, but current practice still needs to be further improved in its actual operation. For this purpose, this paper proposes that improvement should be made in terms of orientation in meaning translation as well as the overall perspective on texts.

A Corpus-Based Survey of Connector Usage in Chinese EFL Learners’ Writing, by CHEN Peng, p. 28

This paper focuses on connector usage in the writing of Chinese EFL learners and native speakers, and presents results based on the comparison of data from the CLEC and LOCENSS corpora, using a corpus of academic writing component of ICE-GB as the benchmark for identifying patterns of connector usage. Results suggest a strong tendency for both Chinese EFL learners and native speakers to overuse connectors with particular functions and underuse others. The comparison among CLEC sub-corpora reveals a similar over-/underuse pattern among all the learners and those learners with higher writing proficiency will have more awareness of connector usage and the using of connectors is much closer to the academic English standards. Limitations and pedagogical implications of this study are also pointed out.

A Corpus-based Study on the Colloquialization of the Negative Form of Auxiliary VerbCan, by LI Hui and LI Jingwei, p. 35

Based on corpora, this paper has investigated the change of varying ratio of the colloquial wordcan’tto the literacy wordcannotover the last century. The research findings show that: First, the change from the frequent use of the formal and literacy wordcannotat the start of last century to the overwhelmingly frequent use of the informal and colloquial wordcan’tat the beginning of this century explicitly illustrates the colloquial trend of English, and the colloquial process of American English proceeded more quickly than that of British English. Second, during the colloquial process of the negative form ofcan, there are some competition and stalemate between the colloquial form and the literacy form. Third, the colloquial trend of the negative form ofcanhas been shown in nearly all styles and registers, such as spoken English, fiction, magazine, newspaper and academic writings. Finally, the social and historical factors causing the colloquial trend of American English have been discussed. The research results will open new horizons for language variation studies and be of great significance in English education.

A Corpus-based Study on Lexical Features in the English Translation ofReportontheWorkoftheGovernment, by CHEN Jiansheng and CUI Yani, p. 39

This paper compares the lexical features of the translated English versions oftheReportsontheWorkoftheGovernment(RWGs) with those of theStateoftheUnionAddressesof the United States in a corpus-based way. The results show that there are differences between these two functionally similar texts in this respect. The paper analyzes the possible reasons leading to the differences and explores the acceptability of the English version of RWGs by native English speakers with respect to lexis. The paper also puts forward some suggestions for the translation of RWGs in the future.

A Study on the Multimedia Corpus-based Data-driven Learning Style, by WU Jinshan, p. 44

The last decades have witnessed the emergence and development of the theoretical and empirical study on corpus-based foreign language teaching. However, most of our current studies are based on the index analysis of plain text corpus. The combination of corpus and multimedia tools is very simple in terms of both concept and application, and its advantages cannot be fully reflected. Therefore, we integrate corpus technique and multimedia resources and propose a multimedia corpus-based data-driven learning method. This paper will mainly discuss the practical and theoretical background of this method and its implementation model.

Establishment and Development of Formative Evaluation Procedure, by WANG Hua, p. 48

Educational evaluation is generally assumed to be a vital part of instruction. Confined by the traditional view of education, language educators have given insufficient attention to formative evaluation, which has been overshadowed by summative evaluation. In the last decades, linguistics and educators at home and abroad have made research on formative evaluation, which is the guidance of English teaching both theoretically and practically. This paper aims at establishing a systematic and principled formative evaluation procedure by means of meta-modeling, which is used to refer to developing model from model through analyzing and comparing different evaluation models on the basis of extensive literature review. This paper is expected to provide guidance to the development and application of the theory of formative evaluation in China.