A Study on English Writing Pattern Under the Impact of High-context and Low-context Cultures

Abstract

This article aims to identify whether cultural factors will cast influences on EFL learners' English and Chinese written compositions. By comparing the participants' English and Chinese compositions entitled "How I deal with stress", the author tries to figure out the different writing patterns in the learner's writing performance. 25 EFL learners are involved in this study, and the participants' written essays are analyzed from the perspective of textual construction, cohesive devices and syntactic complexity. The data was collected and calculated by Juku network system based on the corpus data inside. Four variables (ways of placing the subject, amount of sentences, mean length of a sentence, verb phrases) were tested with the help of SPSS 16.0. The results tend to lead to the following conclusions: first: The low-context (LC) culture cast some influence on EFL learners' English and Chinese written works. Second: The factors of HC culture have little effect on Chinese learners' English writing performance now. On the contrary, the LC culture has some impact on their essays. Third: The syntactic complexity of Chinese and English compositions has suggested little significance in the same testees' writing performance.