Research On Discourse Transfer In Chinese College Students' English Composition And The Relevant Writing Strategies

This thesis intends to explore the validity of the discourse-based writing instruction in minimizing the discourse transfer which exists in the Chinese college students' English writing, employing theories in Language transfer, Discourse Analysis, Second Language Writing and some other relevant Second Language Teaching theories.In Chinese students' English compositions, it is not a rare phenomenon that every single sentence is grammatically perfect, but in the eyes of native speakers, the ideas are not logically arranged and clearly illustrated, and their expressions are thought to be Chinglish. The reason is that Chinese students often translate or attempt to translate their mother tongue words, phrases, and organization into the target language when they write in English. How to minimize the discourse transfer? How to help students organize their ideas coherently and develop paragraphs cohesively? These are important issues for English teachers and researchers.First of all, a literature review about Language Transfer, Discourse Analysis and Second Language Writing was made to construct a theoretical foundation for the whole, of which Discourse Transfer is the focus. Then, the writer made a theoretical comparison between Chinese and English Writing in terms of the thesis development, the paragraph dividing, the topic sentence and the paragraph cohesion, with a purpose of providing some criteria for the investigation carried out later.The present study applies a pretest-posttest non-equivalent control group design and lasts 11 weeks. The subjects are 97 sophomores of Class A and Class B from a Department at a certain University. Class A is the controlled group; Class B is the experimental group, which was given the discourse-based writing instructions in mini-lessons. In the pretest and posttest, all the subjects were asked to write an essay with no less than 150 hundred words within 50 minutes in class. All the 97 essays are first scanned by the author; those below 150 words are rejected. And 20 samples are selected randomly from each class both in pretest and posttest. To guarantee the objectivity of the assessment, each sample was respectively evaluated once by the three teachers. All the data obtained is given the quantitative and qualitative descriptions. After a careful analysis, we found that the answers to the four hypotheses are:1. Discourse transfer exists in the writing of the participants.2. Discourse transfer is correlated to the writing quality of the participants.3. After the discourse-based writing instruction, discourse transfer appears less frequently in the writing of the participants who received the writing instruction than in that of those who did not receive such instruction.4. After the discourse-based writing instruction, the writing quality of the participants who received the writing instruction is not higher than in that of those who did not receive such instruction. But it is not scientific to say that the discourse-based writing is not effective in English writing, because writing is an integrated skill. The reason lies in the fact that the writing involves three other competences: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence.Based on the findings, there is reason to believe that the discourse-based writing instruction is effective and beneficial. Therefore, teachers should 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.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.