An Analysis Of Discourse Errors In Chinese English Majors' Expository Writings

Error analysis (EA), as a research field in applied linguistics, has undoubtedly made much contribution to second language teaching and learning. It not only throws some light on what the learner has progressed and strategies the learner employs in the process of second language learning, but also helps language teachers learn the common characteristics shared by language learners.The analysis of errors in students' compositions aims to improve their writing proficiency. With regard to the previous researches on EA in English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writings in China—most EA are done at syntactical or grammatical level, and few are done at discourse level—this thesis focuses only on the analysis of the discourse errors in 30 Junior English majors' expository writings by employing the theories of error analysis, discourse analysis (DA), contrastive rhetoric (CR) and some related writing theories. To learn where the discourse errors mainly lie, what fields Chinese students of English are the weakest in constructing expository writings and which type of discourse errors most significantly influences the quality of expository writings so as to provide some information for the remedial lessons, we first identify and classify the discourse errors. Then with the help of EXCEL and SPSS, we count which type of errors ranks the first and what error most distinguishes the good writings from the poor ones. The results show: (1) junior English majors, though have a good command of English knowledge at word and syntactical level, their compositions have abundant errors at discourse level such as whole essay organization errors, thesis presentation errors, topical paragraph organization errors, cohesive errors and concluding paragraph errors; (2) the most frequently occurring errors are topical paragraph organization errors; (3) among these errors,...