A Contrastive Analysis Of Discourse Transfer In Chinese College Students' English Writing

This thesis attempts to interpret the negative effects of discourse transfer in Chinese college students'English writing by means of contrastive analysis, so as to find a workable way in which teachers can help students produce more English-like writings. As is well acknowledged, writing is of great importance either in English teaching or learning, while the present situation of Chinese college students'writing proficiency does not seem to be satisfying although much effort has been made by both teachers and learners. Many of the students'compositions are regarded as incoherent and unorganized in a native English speaker's eyes. To a large extent, this is because the students lack the ability to organize their compositions appropriately and effectively although they are grammatically competent, namely, their discourse competence is poor. In many of their compositions, the influence of Chinese thinking and writing conventions is obvious, and the phenomenon of discourse transfer of native into target is common. How to overcome this negative influence from mother tongue and reduce it to the minimum? What are the reasons for this influence and what is the relationship between discourse transfer and the students'language proficiency? These are things that we are going to explore in this thesis. First of all, a literature review about transfer theory and Contrastive Analysis (CA) hypothesis was made to construct a theoretical foundation for the whole, of which discourse transfer and CA at the discourse level is the focus. Then, the writer made a contrastive analysis of the discourse features between Chinese and English in terms of discourse patterns, coherence & cohesion, and writing styles with a purpose of providing some criteria for the investigation carried out later. According to Kaplan (1966), it can be seen as the major difference between English and Chinese whether the writing is of direct/linear pattern or indirect/spiral pattern which is preferred by Anglo-Americans and Oriental people respectively. Chinese writing values meaning more than form, as a result, the way a discourse is organized is determined by the semantic relationship or context, and conjunctions are not vital (Hu Shuzhong 1993). On the contrary, English values logical reasoning, which requires exactness and clearness of language expression. Different ways of thinking have resulted in different ways of writing. In the following, an investigation was made to explore mainly four questions. They are: l Does discourse transfer exist in Chinese college students'English writing? l Does discourse transfer appear less frequently in the writings of the students who have the knowledge of discourse differences than in that of the students who have no such knowledge? l Does discourse transfer appear more frequently in the writings of the students with lower language proficiency than in those with higher language proficiency? l Is the writing quality of the students who have the knowledge of the discourse differences higher than that of the students who do not have such knowledge? After a careful analysis, we found that the answers to the three questions are all positive which has great implications for EFL teaching in China. That is: the necessity of awareness raising which includes two aspects: At first, students need to raise their awareness about the distinct features of both languages. It is not only necessary but also significant for them to build some knowledge about this in minds so as to improve their ability of organizing ideas in English writing. Secondly, teachers need to raise their consciousness about giving a formal instruction as well as a special training on this in order to help students overcome the negative aspect of discourse transfer. What's more, a good awareness is also beneficial for students to gain a new and deeper insight into the nature of their mother tongue. To achieve this, some pedagogical suggestions were made by the writer. They are: empathy developing; critical reading with contrastive consciousness; practicing outline writing; practicing reorganization; combining discourse analysis with writing; and giving a conclusive comment, etc. After all, they are the writer's personal points of view and can be open to all teachers interested in this topic. Special attention should be made that the main concern of this thesis is the non-English majors at colleges who, comparing with the English majors, spend less time and receive less training in English writing.