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Chapter FiveMajor Causes and Suggested Solutions

5.1 Major Causes
As is stated by many scholars such as Cai (2001) and Xie (2003)，the culturaldifferences, especially the different value systems and thinking patterns have greatimpact on students' writing. In English majors' argumentative writing, it is commonlyseen that students tend to use first and third person plural pronouns to express theiropinions or in some cases, they shift from the singular pronoun “1” which occurs in theintroduction part to the plural pronoun “we” in the conclusion part. The shifted personpronouns indicate the shifted points of view and thus destroy the coherence of point ofview and meanwhile the writer's stance is also not clear. That is probably due to thefact that Chinese people advocate collectivism and "individualism is seen problematic，，(Conner, 1996: 38). In Chinese articles, it seems correct to adopt the plural pronounseven when expressing personal opinions to show modesty. However, when writingEnglish argumentative compositions, it is of great importance to present the argumentsin a logical way in one's own perspective.
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Conclusion

The present study is an investigation into the problems of point of view and stancein English majors' argumentative writing based on the theoretical foundations ofsystemic functional linguistic and pragmatics. The major findings of the present studyare listed as follows:First, with regard to the problems of point of view, it is found that students tend toexpress their own opinion by using first and third person plural pronouns whichaccount for 27.37% and 42.49% respectively. More than 63% students have difficultyin maintaining a coherent point of view partly due to the frequent shifts of personpronoun within one sentence and between sentences. In addition, the inappropriateshift of tense in the argumentative writing also indicates the incoherence of thetemporal point of view, which further leads to the incoherence of the writing.Meanwhile, some motion verbs such as ‘‘come” and ‘‘go，，are used inappropriatelywhich affect the coherence of spatial point of view. Besides, the occurrence of theincoherent point of view also lies in the students' failure to choose the appropriatedominant theme and their disability to distribute appropriately the given and newinformation.
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