A Discourse Error Analysis Of Non-english Major Students’ EFL Writing

EFL writing is an important part of English learning as well as the most difficultpart of English learning. For the non-English majors in Chinese universities, the lowcapacity of discourse coherence is one of the major weaknesses in their EFL writing.Scholars home and aboard attribute much importance to the discourse error analysisand have done lots of researches. But most researches focused on the level of sentencesand lexicons as well as mother tongue. Seldom researches are about the ratio ofdiscourse errors and the connection between discourse errors and English writingquality,On the basis of the theory of error analysis, and Halliday and Hasan’s view in thediscourse error analysis, error analysis will help the improvement of EFL writingquality and discourse errors can be divided into two levels: discourse errors atmacro-level and discourse errors at micro-level. According to Cai’s opinion, writingquality requires not only the effectiveness of sentences and lexicon at micro-level butalso the effectiveness of the whole text. Based on these views and relative theories, theauthor of the paper collected EFL writings from117non-English sophomores,classifying, encoding and counting discourse errors at micro-level and macro-level.The purpose is to get the implications for EFL writing teaching through the analysis ofthe ratio of different discourse errors and the connection between discourse errors andwriting quality. After investigation, in this EFL writing:(1) Discourse errors atmicro-level are the major discourse errors.(2) Reference and conjunction errors are themajor discourse errors at micro-level. Comparative reference errors are the majorreference errors and adversative conjunction errors are the major conjunction errors.(3)The number of discourse errors is in connection with the writing quality. The lessdiscourse errors at macro-level in writing, the higher quality of the writing. And lessdiscourse errors at micro-level don’t result in the higher quality writing. The resultsshow that: in the EFL writing instruction, cohesions especially the conjunction andreference cohesions should be instructed systematically. Besides, the good command ofthe whole text will benefit the EFL writing. Thus, cohesion and the understanding ofwhole text should be attached importance by the learners and teachers.