On Effects of Eastern-Western Thinking Differences on the Chinese Students' Use of Topic Sentence in English Writing

The differences in thinking between Eastern and Western people are resulted from their different geographic environments,cultural sources,historical backgrounds and political factors.The Chinese traditional thinking lays emphasis on synthesis and intuition while the western thinking focuses on analysis and logic.Influenced by their integral and intuitive thinking way,the Chinese students prefer to hide the topic sentence among the whole paragraph while writing compositions in English.Meanwhile,the so-called qu is cherished when explaining the theme of the paragraph.That is to express the main idea in a tortuous way.However,this practice is often regarded as inappropriate or even inexperienced by the Westerns who prefer to express their ideas in a straight and linear way.So it is proposed that college English teachers impart to students the knowledge of the Chinese-Western thinking difference so that the Chinese students can be theoretically guided in English writing.In this way,the students will be better helped to organize their compositions on the English discourse patterns and compose idiomatic English writings.