An Analysis Of College Students' Writing Mistakes In English Writing

EFL writing is an important part as well as the most difficult part of English learning. Based on discourse analysis theory and error analysis theory, this research aims to identify the discourse errors made by college non-English majors in argumentative writing, correlation between the use of discourse devices and English writing quality and analyze possible causes of these errors. The errors in students’ English writing are addressed both at macro and micro discourse which plays a role in achieving textual coherence.The subjects in this study are 50 first-year students majoring in Textiles Fabric at TJPU. These texts to be analyzed are compositions in their mid-term examination, which is required to contain about 160 words. This study is to classify, encode and count discourse errors at micro-level and macro-level. Students’questionnaire and teachers’interviews are also used in this study. The purpose is to get the implications for EFL writing teaching through the analysis of the ratio of different discourse errors and the connection between the use of discourse devices and writing quality, and to detect their possible sources and make an attempt to present some suggestion for language learners on how to avoid errors in terms of discourse analysis. This study shows that (1) Discourse errors at micro-level are the major discourse errors, and reference and lexical cohesion errors are the major discourse errors at micro-level. (2) The use of discourse devices is in connection with the writing quality. (3) Different thinking patterns and linguistic factors maybe account for these discourse errors students make.