A Contrastive Analysis Of Discourse Transfer In English Writing Of Middle School Students In China

The object of discourse research is the language in use rather than language in imagination or the language made by people. The relationships of language form and its meaning, language in use and its context, language users'interaction, coherence and cohesion, rhetoric, and the relationship of language and culture and ideology are also within the field of discourse analyses. Actually, from the very beginning, discourse analysis had already had a close relationship with the applied linguistics. And one of the most important fields in the applied linguistics research is language education. If the traditional language study is confined to the levels below the sentence, in the recent years, the researches based on the discourse level analysis are becoming more and more active. The study of language shouldn't only stay on the levels of phonetics, lexicon, and sentence, but should develop into the discourse level. Thus, we could see that the research of discourse is very meaningful for the foreign teaching.This thesis, with Transfer, Discourse Analysis, and Contrastive Analysis as its theoretical basis, analyzes the compositions written by Chinese middle school students. There are two reasons why the writer chose Chinese middle school students'writing as the research subjects: firstly, among the four basic abilities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, writing plays an important role. Writing is not only the way of solidifying listening, speaking, reading and writing, but a kind of urgent way of conveying writing language. The written literal materials can filter, filtrate and modify people's experience or experiences. Although a nation has varieties of dialects, but the written language formed by the history is uniform, that is the uniform of literal system which could help the people with different dialects communicate with each other. However, to master the literal system needs hard working. Compared with the written language, spoken language is flexible and various, and sometimes the changes of the spoken language are more acceptable by the publics than that of the written language. This is what we said that spoken language is loose, not as precise as written language. Spoken expression needs speed and it will get the purpose when the partner understands the meanings. The written language is quite different. It requires careful considerations from the spelling, grammar, punctuation to the rhetoric, discourse structure and logicality. For once there is a mistake, and it will not escape the readers'attentions. This is the necessities of training written ability. Secondly: the middle school students are a special English learning groups whose study assignment is very hard, and they have to recite many words and grammars under the burden of exam, thus basically they study English under an intense environment which change their study emphases. As the writer knows, in China, many English teachers put a large of time and attentions on training the students'grammar and reading, however, ignore the training of English writing. The written expression takes the large percent of scores in their entrance examination, but many students lost a lot of scores in composition and influence the whole score finally. So, it is necessary to improve the middle school students'English writing at once. In order to make this subject forceful and effective, the writer takes the compositions in 44th Middle School's final exam as this research's subject. In this paper, the compositions of this final exam with contrastive analysis first, followed by a discussion of the results. The results show:( 1) it does exit discourse transfer in the Chinese middle school students'English writing, for example, at the level of rhetoric, coherence, cohesion, and writing style. (2) The organization (coherence) is the typical transfer. (3) The typical English discourse pattern is deductive pattern; the typical Chinese discourse patter is indirect pattern. Through discussion, the writer hopes to provide ways of correction and some pedagogical implications this research has made on the English teaching. Finally, it is hoped that this study will be helpful to foreign teaching and improve the middle school students'English writing level.