Cohesive Error Analysis In Discourse Of English Background Foreign Students With Medium And Advanced Level

Foreign students learning Chinese urge to communicate with others expressing largeamount of discourse, especially after they have acquired the basic phonetics, vocabulary,grammar rules and some extent of cultural background. However, cohesive errors are prettycommon phenomena that even exist among the foreign students with medium and theadvanced level. If the problem is not solved immediately, it will weaken the Chinese level ofthe second language learners. Focusing on the cohesive errors in the foreign students’compositions, this thesis searches cohesive errors among the English background studentswith medium and the advanced level in100compositions. It classifies the errors, analyzes thereasons of them, and in the end makes suggestions to the Chinese teaching as a secondlanguage. The thesis is composed of four parts. Introducing the fundamental theories ofdiscourse, cohesion and error analysis, Part one also sums up several classifications ofcohesion and the relationship between cohesion and coherence, the overall research uponerrors as well. Examples of different types of cohesive errors are fully investigated in thesecond part. Part three analyzes the reasons of each kind of errors from the following threeperspectives: negative transfer of the mother tongue, the over-usage of the cohesive ways andthe impact of teachers’ teaching process and that of the textbooks. Suggestions to Chineseteaching as a second language are made in the fourth part, meanwhile the thesis tries topropose some personal strategies directed at the characteristic errors especially for Englishbackground foreign students.