An Analysis Of Discourse Errors In Non-English Major Students' EFL Writings

Writing is one of the four fundamental skills of foreign language learning.In recent years,English writing has been causing an increasingly concern by many researchers.Through all kinds of approaches,people have conducted a lot of studies on China's college students' EFL writing and teaching method as well as its effect from various aspects.Results of different researches indicate that many college students' English writing performance is still at a low level,especially,their discourse deficiency stands out.It is obvious that the traditional product-oriented EFL writing approach fails to solve such kinds of problems because it lays overemphasis on the aspects of lexicon and syntax,which leads to students' insufficient writing competence at discourse level.It is common that students' English writings,even those without serious grammatical errors or misspellings,impress on readers incoherence and illogicality,which mainly result from the errors at the discourse level. Discourse analysis theories bring new insights into the teaching of EFL writing.As a new branch of learning,the aims of the studies on discourse analysis is the structure and function of language in use,therefore,many theories such as discourse patterns, cohesion and coherence can be applied to EFL writing teaching so as to make great contribution to the enhancement of students' EFL writing competence.Many English teachers and researchers have made a lot of studies on the problems or errors made by the college students in their EFL writings,but their studies are restricted in theoretical research or just based on qualitative empirical study,empirical studies that are based on quantitative research or combining quantitative and qualitative research are relatively rare.In addition,on the aspect of subjects,the previous researches seldom distinguish the successful writers form the poor ones,thus they can not account clearly for the differences of discourse competence and errors in EFL writings of these two different writing level groups.In the light of this situation,the present study will be carried out mainly from the four aspects below:1) What is the situation of intermediate college non-English major students' EFL writing proficiency at discourse level? 2) What are the main errors of intermediate college non-English major students' EFL writing at discourse level? 3) What are the major differences of errors at discourse level in EFL writing between successful and unsuccessful student writers? 4) What are the major causes for the errors?The samples involved in the thesis are 80 pieces of EFL writings by 80 sophomores in four different classes of Qingdao Technological University and Huzhou Teacher College.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 structure errors.The results of the analysis indicate that there are relatively abundant errors or problems in Chinese students' EFL writings.There are significant differences on discourse errors between successful writers' writings and unsuccessful writers' writings on both macro-level and micro-level.The major reasons that cause discourse errors in students' writings include different thought patterns of the nations of English and Chinese,students' insufficient of linguistic competence,and the lacking and neglect of culturing students' discourse competence in writing teaching.So college English writing teaching must be aiming at the whole discourse of a composition.Teaching measures include strengthening students' cognition and awareness of discourse analysis by reading and analyzing of model texts;paying more attention to discourse problems in writing checking;practicing reorganization of a scrambled text or paragraph;doing Chinese-English translation and comparing the differences of the two languages' discourse patterns.All kinds of effective approaches should be applied to enhance students' competence of discourse analysis so as to decrease discourse errors in their EFL writings.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One is a brief description of background;purpose and significance of the study.Chapter Two is literature review. Three is the research methodology.It deals with the purpose,subjects,instruments and data collection.Chapter Four presents a detailed analysis of the discourse errors found in the samples and detects their possible sources.Chapter Five considers the implications for college English writing teaching.Then the conclusion part draws an outline of the whole study,points out deficiencies of the research and·gives suggestions for future research.