| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學系 === 103 === This study focuses on the pragmatic strategies and discourse structure of Chinese and Japanese weblog narratives. With the expansion of the Internet, online communication tools have become prevalent forms of interaction in modern society. Among all the new mediums, weblogs have gained widespread popularity as a new genre of narrative, and have been widely applied in teaching writing in second language classrooms.
The weblog serves not only as a space for personal storytelling, but also as a space for social networking due to the publicity of Internet context. Previous studies have indicated that there are various interpersonal communicative strategies implemented in weblogs as well as expressive strategies. However, the importance of these strategies still remains unknown. The distribution of different strategies in weblog discourse also remains a question to be explored. Furthermore, there has been ample discussion about cross cultural differences of Internet language, emphasizing the culture diversity in the online context. Nevertheless, little attention to date has been paid to cross-linguistic differences of weblogs. This study aims to contrast the pragmatic strategies implemented in Chinese and Japanese weblogs, and to look further into their distribution in weblog discourse. Chinese and Japanese weblog narratives are also compared to examine cross-linguistic differences between weblogs that belong to different cultures.
A random sample of Chinese and Japanese travel stories were collected from the top travel weblogs in PIXNET and FC2, the most widely known blog service platforms in Taiwan and Japan. The analysis of strategies reveals that both Chinese and Japanese web loggers narrate with expositive strategies, and expositive strategies are of equal importance with expressive strategies, indicating that in addition to the expressive function, the expositive function is significant in weblog narratives as well. The analysis of discourse structure shows that expositive strategies are frequently used in the orientation and coda of the story to build and enhance writer-reader connection. These features can be attributed to the open nature of online context. On the other hand, Chinese and Japanese also differ in the preference of strategic types and the significance of expositve function. Chinese tends to combine multiple strategies into the story and emphasizes emotional strategies such to achieve interactional effects, while Japanese tends to employ a single strategy to advance the development of the story, and prefer using strategies such as request and appreciation to achieve politeness. In addition, the influence of expositive function is greater in Chinese weblogs than in Japanese weblogs.
The findings of this study will be applied in Chinese as second language writing classrooms for intermediate Japanese students. The aim is to use weblogs to enhance their writing ability of narration and exposition in Chinese.
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