Investigation And Analysis Of Discourse Errors In Non-English Major Postgraduates' Writings

English writing practice of Chinese students has already been an issue that attracts the attention of many researchers and teachers. The research results indicate that by analyzing the errors manifested in the students' writings we can better understand the developmental process of their learning. Many studies have been carried out on the lexical and grammatical levels. The results of such studies may be helpful for the beginners or intermediate learners. The advanced learners need to make progress on higher level. This thesis examines the errors at discourse level made by non-English major postgraduates in HEU, analyzes the causes of these errors, and proposes some suggestions to English learning.In light of the theory of discourse analysis, the thesis studied the argumentative writings of these subjects, classified and analyzed those discourse errors. The results show that many subjects can write English compositions grammatically right, but have many problems at discourse level, such as thesis presentation, paragraph development which includes topic sentence statement, supporting information, inter-clause relations, specification of certain general ideas, etc.The thesis suggests that because the students have not established the English pattern of thought and good knowledge of the differences between Chinese and English, they write with the interference of Chinese language.