An Investigation Into The Chinese Non-English Majors' Problems In Written Discourse

In FL teaching in china, the development of writing skills has always been emphasized. It is said that writing skills are harder for teachers to develop in students than other skills, and English teachers meet a lot of difficulties in this skill development in their classroom teaching. Traditionally, the Chinese way of teaching and learning English has focused on correcting students'grammatical errors acquiring the sentence-level knowledge, such as syntactic correction and lexical accuracy. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which sentences and paragraphs are combined to form stretches of connected discourse. This research is intended to investigate Chinese Non-English majors'problems in written discourse.In the first place, it introduces the knowledge of written discourse: its concepts; features and functions. Discourse is constituted by text. A text has texture, the texture expresses the property of"being a text". Whether the composition constitutes a text depends on whether it has texture. The rudimentary content of texture involves cohesion and coherence."Coherence"is an important quality of effective writing. Then it introduces the language and thought from three aspects: relationship; transfer; differences between oriental and occidental modes of thinking, which will have influence on L2 writing. The concept of writing is introduced in terms of the nature of writing and the process of writing then it presents foreign researchers'idea on Chinese students'problems in written discourse: paragraph development, the development of the paragraph may be said to be turning and turning in a widening gyre the circles or gyres turn around the subjects and show it from a variety of tangential vies but the subjects are never looked at directly. Indirectness: Chinese favors a delayed introduction of purpose. Lack or misuse textual markersA total of 80 first-year students from Changchun Taxation College were selected as participants for this study, and each of them was asked to write a composition and complete a questionnaire. 30 texts were chosen for researching use and they were analyzed and evaluated by three standards: overall arrangement of the text, paragraph development and sentence cohesion markers to see whether the problems: inadequate paragraph development, indirectness, to lack or misuse textual markers are still handicaps for Chinese students'English writing now. A total of 80 questionnaires were collected and analyzed with the aim to dig out more problems and reasons behind the problems. Results showed that more than a half of Chinese students have already been accustomed to state their idea directly in the beginning of a paragraph, Therefore the problem that indirectness of Chinese students'English writing as Hinds said is not that obvious as before. From the results it found that the problem of paragraph development was proved to be an urgent factor which really demands our English teachers'attention to improve. Results from text analysis and questionnaire disclosed students'problems on textual markers in writing: results of text analysis reveals that textual markers can be found in every text, participants tend to use textual markers to show the relationship and...