Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

WENHUI XUAN, THE HONGKONG POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITYCIRCUMSTANTIAL ELEMENTS IN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS WRITINGBasing on the classification of circumstantial elements made by MatthiessenChristian and M.A.K.Halliday (2004) in systemic functional linguistics, this paperstudies the grade 10 students writing from the perspective of circumstantialelements. The author wants to know how much circumstantial elements do thegrade 10 students in Guangzhou have already acquired, and what kind ofcharacteristics in their use of circumstantial elements in their writing. With all thestudents writing assignment, the author extracts all the circumstances in theirwriting thoroughly, combined with the demonstration of the two pieces ofstudents’ typical samples, the author tries to find some characteristics in theiremployment of circumstances. After analyzing the materials, the author concludesthat top students will employ more circumstantial elements in their writing toenrich their expression. With these findings, the author gives several suggestionson how to improve the teaching of writing in high school level from the perspectiveof systemic functional linguistics.PAPER SESSION 10G - ROOM 9 - FRIDAY, 29 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 203 Lisbon, July 2011