Discourse Error Analysis: A Study Of English Writing By Chinese Non-English Major Students

Writing is one of the most important skills in foreign language learning. Chinese college students have always been regarding English writing as difficult. It is common that their English essays, even those without serious grammatical errors or misspellings, impress on readers incoherence and illogicality, which mainly result from the errors at the discourse level.Many English teachers and researchers have been doing the error analysis on the grammatical errors and misspellings in college students' English writing, but have seldom made researches to identify the discourse errors, which cannot meet the needs of college students of improving their writing skill. Discourse error analysis can be helpful to improve students' writing skill and their ability to communicate.By applying Error Analysis theory and Discourse Analysis theory, the thesis makes an analysis of the errors made by college non-English majors from the discourse perspective, detectstheir possible sources and makesan attempt to present some suggestions for the language learners on how to avoid discourse errors.The samples involved in the thesis are 30 pieces of argumentative writing by 30 junior-year students in Computer Department of Shandong University, who have past College English Test Band 4. The errors concerning discourse are identified at both micro-level and macro-level. The micro-level refers to the cohesion errors, and the macro-level the text organization errors. The results of the analysis offer us evidence on the potential existence of abundant discourse-level errors in Chinese students' English writing. In addition to lack of linguistic knowledge, different discourse characteristics resulting from different ways of thinking between the Chinese and the westerners are a main cause for discourse errors. An effective wav to raise students'discourse awareness is to strengthen discourse analysis in the process of reading and improve the traditional approach to teaching writing. Besides, the training of students' culture sensitivity is another important aspect in foreign language teaching.The thesis consists of four parts. Chapter one is a review of literature including two major relevant theories, error analysis and discourse analysis, and the background knowledge about Contrastive Rhetoric. Also the description of argumentative structure is mentioned here. Chapter Two is the research methodology. It deals with the purpose, subjects, instruments and data collection. Chapter Three presents a detailed analysis of the discourse errors found in the samples and detects their possible sources. Chapter Four considers the implications for English teaching. Then the conclusion is drawn outlining the significance of the research and giving suggestions for future research.