Discoursal Error Analysis: A Study Of English Academic Writing By The Postgraduates

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex process, during which learners commit a large number of errors. The study of error has been carried out by many scholars at home and abroad (Bhatia, 1974; Dulay, and Burt. 1974; Zhu Meiping, 1990; Liu Shaolong, 1999.etc.). They believe that most errors that learners make should not be corrected because they are developmental ones, which have aroused great attention and have been explored by many researchers. However, their researches focused chiefly on data collected from elementary and intermediate learners, and at the word level and the syntactic level. The discoursal errors made by the advanced learners, postgraduates, have seldom been mentioned, especially English academic writings written by them.This dissertation attempts to make some tentative investigation and scrutinize the discoursal errors in the 66 samples written by the postgraduates from 3 universities in Chongqing.Before the analysis, a questionnaire about the current situation of teaching and writing English academic papers has been carried out. Then 66 papers, including 35 graduation dissertations, are chosen as the samples.After identification and categorization, these discourse errors are divided into five categories according to their different forms: discoursal errors in category-mixture; discoursal errors in inconsistency; discoursal errors in ambiguity; discoursal overgeneralization; discoursal errors in subject—shifting. Then detailed analyses of these samples are made according to the five categories.The major findings are summarized as the following:Firstly, as the advanced learners, postgraduates commit fewer errors at the word level or syntactical level, but make more errors at the discourse level because of negative transfer of Chinese thought pattern. The data collected from the samples prove that there do exist a lot of discourse errors in the postgraduates'research papers.Secondly, many discourse errors made by the postgraduates take up 53% of the total errors. Discoursal error analysis will be paid more and more attention to.Thirdly, sufficient and efficient academic courses are urgently needed in universities,especially for the postgraduates from science and technology majors.To lessen discoursal errors, most students think academic writing is not easy because of various internal and external factors affecting their writing. More and more effective teaching modes in academic writing are urgently needed in colleges and universities.The current research is only an attempt to find out the discoursal errors in academic writings and their classification from which some findings may be drawn. It is hoped that the research findings of this thesis can arouse the postgraduates'attention, consideration and logical thinking in writing their academic writings as a whole.