Discourse Analysis And Its Application In EFL Writing

Since World War II, English has been playing a significant role in international communication, and has become an indispensable instrument for economic, scientific and technological cooperation. Required by time and tide, great attention is devoted to English language teaching. It is unfair to claim that little improvement has been achieved in students' English competence. But, despite time and energy paid by teachers and language learners, students' written competence is far from satisfaction.Influenced by various second language acquisition theories and teaching experience, there have emerged a few new approaches to teach ESL writing. More and more teachers begin to adopt them, such as process approach and genre approach to teach writing. However, along with the researches on ESL writing, some disadvantages of these approaches have been found gradually. A number of the English compositions written by non-English majors remain incoherent and unorganized, though many of them can write flawless English sentences. Then how to improve language learners' English writing ability has become a problem that still plagues college teachers in China.As a relatively new branch of study on language, discourse analysis has provided the new insights into language teaching. Some theories in discourse analysis, such as cohesion, schema, and discourse patterns are important in improving students' writing competence. Cohesion is the formal and structural relationship between linguistic items, which concerns how the text is constructed as a semantic being. Cohesion is realized by cohesive ties, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Schema theory emphasizes the role of background knowledge in language comprehension. There are two processes of language interpretation: top-down and bottom-up processing. Linguistic and cultural factors may influence thinking patterns in ESL Learners. When they write, their thinking patterns will affect discourse organization. Different linguists classify the discourse patterns in different perspectives and three common discourse patterns are: problem-solution pattern, generalization particular pattern and claim-counter claim pattern.The paper first tries to investigate into the factors leading to writing deficiency by distributing questionnaires to non-English majors with interviews conducted among 8 teachers. The results of the investigation present that the students' deficiency in English writing is mainly due to insufficient productive vocabulary, poor organization and lack of explicit classroom instruction and writing practice. After brief review of second language writing teaching approaches and study on some theories in discourse analysis such as cohesion, schema theory and discourse patterns, this thesis seeks to find an appropriate balance between approaches and apply the theory of discourse analysis to the writing instruction practice in Chinese context. It simultaneously uses some experiments to illustrate the feasibility of the application of discourse analysis in writing instruction.