The Impact Of Discourse Awareness On Chinese EFL Learners’ English Writing

Not only has English writing been a Gordian knot of English instruction inChina, it is also the bottleneck confining Chinese EFL learners’ advancement ofoverall language proficiency. In recent years, studies on English writing from theperspective of discourse awareness offer broadened visions by giving more attentionto integration and wholeness of language encoding.Traditional researches intend to treat foreign language writing as arule-governed accumulation of words and phrases into paragraphs and passages.They pay much attention to hierarchical features within language and comparativefeatures of rules between languages, and hence ignore the conscious behaviors of thesubjects. Cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics both see foreign languagewriting as a complex psychological process, represented in the form of discourseafter a combined processing of expressing thoughts and transforming languages.In order to find out the correlation between discourse awareness and writingperformance, this thesis adopts mixed methods research to approach from theperspective of discourse awareness and study its strength on EFL writing. Theempirical experiment in this thesis is based on a random selection of165Englishmajor students from different grades. After the subjects handed in the givenquestionnaires and finished the directed writing, results of these two weretransformed into scores and put into SPSS16.0for Spearman’s correlationcoefficient. Thus, we gained the correlation coefficient of the strength of discourseawareness and English writing proficiency, as high as0.771. To further probe intothis matter, the researcher trisected the subjects according to their scores on discourseawareness questionnaire into high, middle and low. With t-test, statisticallysignificant difference showed between the high and low groups. Then by qualitativeanalysis of think-aloud protocol gained correspondingly from the above two groups,this thesis obtained the differences of how levels of discourse awareness influence the composing process. Such findings were described then as the major researchfindings of this thesis:1) the strength of discourse awareness is significantlycorrelated with the English proficiency;2) during composing, EFL writers with highdiscourse awareness represent features and noticing points different from thoseshowed from their counterparts of low discourse awareness.