Discourse Transfer In Chinese Non-majors' English Writing

The discourse problems of EFL/ESL writing have long attracted language teachers and researchers. Researchers have explored the issue from different perspectives. This paper aims to study transfer in Chinese non-English majors'English writing at discourse level. The study is conducted in light of transfer theory, contrastive analysis and discourse analysis. The writer first introduces the transfer theory and contrastive analysis, then compares and contrasts the writing conventions of English and Chinese. Contrastive rhetoric as an area of exploring the writing problems in SLA presupposes the transfer theory. Many contrastive rhetoricians believes that Chinese discourse patterns are characterized by induction and non-linearity as opposed to the English deductive and linear ones. To verify this belief and to investigate how transfer operates at both macro and micro level of discourse, 60 expository compositions written in English in one class and 46 samples of similar topic written in Chinese in another have been analyzed from the perspectives of the whole essay organization, paragraph development and cohesion. A comparison of both groups of the essays in terms of macro features confirms this belief. It indicates that the structure of the English essays is heavily influenced by the Chinese rhetoric. The result also shows that transfer happens in students'application of such cohesive devices as reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion. It is argued that students'writing habit, among other factors, constitutes one of the major factors that contribute to the low quality of the students'writing. Thinking in Chinese and translating when writing result in the occurrence of transfer. Based on the investigation and the discussion, pedagogical implication is proposed which includes 1) enhancing the awareness of intercultural differences in teaching English writing; 2) developing discourse competence by means of reading, discourse analysis, contrastive analysis of rhetoric; and 3) revising course design and course book for writing.