An Analysis On The Discourse Transfer In College English Writing

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 language into target one 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 language transfer theory and Contrastive Analysis (CA) at discourse level are made to construct a theoretical foundation for the whole, of which discourse transfer and CA at the discourse level are the focuses. Then, the writer makes a contrastive analysis of the discourse features between Chinese and English in terms of discourse patterns, coherence & cohesion. An investigation of the writings of 40 college students in Guangxi Traditional Chinese Medical University is then adopted to find out the answers to the questions mentioned before. After careful analysis, the results show that:●Discourse transfer exists in Chinese college students' English writing.●Discourse transfer appears 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.●Discourse transfer appears more frequently in the writings of the students with lower language proficiency than in those with higher language proficiency.●The writing quality of the students who have the knowledge of the discourse differences is higher than that of the students who do not have such knowledge.The answers to the questions are all positive which have 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 students' 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 are made by the writer. They are: critical reading with contrastive consciousness; writing exercises; practicing reorganization exercises; etc.