Discourse Competence In English Writing

Discourse competence, especially textual discourse competence, refers to the ability of a writer to construct well-structured written texts, to make the text coherent, and to make important points distinctive or prominent, which is what Bachman (1990) put forward as a component of language competence, according to whom, language competences comprise organizational competence and pragmatic competence, and the former includes grammatical competence and discourse competence. Discourse competence is always manifested by some textual features.Quite a lot of domestic studies on textual features of English as second language (ESL) writing, on the basis of contrastive rhetoric and text linguistics, have found some textual inadequacies in Chinese college students' ESL writings, and ascribe this to the result of negative transfer from Chinese, the source language, to English, the target language. These studies, on one hand, are beneficial to the research of English as second language (ESL) writing in China, but on the other neglect one thing: personal factors of individual writer. Based on these valuable findings, and aided by theories of cognitive styles and text linguistics, the present thesis attempted to prove that a writer's cognitive style, i.e. field-independence and field-dependence (FI/FD), may have an influence on his discourse competence.The study includes methods of quantitative and qualitative study. To test students' preference of cognitive styles, the author adopted the widely accepted measuring tool originated by Witkin (1971), Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), which was administered it to 156 subjects of 4 different classes in different majors in Shaanxi Normal University. Each subject got a score which reflects his/her preference of FI/FD.After that, an argumentative composition with an identical title was assigned to the same group of students, who were asked to write no less than 150 words in their writing. The compositions collected afterwards were graded independently by two raters according to their textual features, i.e. text organization, paragraph development,...