Functional-Discoursal Analysis Of English Majors’ Graduation Theses

Graduation thesis writing is a reflection of English majors’abilities of knowledge application, scientific research and language expression. It is the main practice education during the undergraduate teaching programme. My review about the studies on English majors’graduation theses indicates that studies in this respect are not sufficient. Most of the related researches reveal the major problems existing in undergraduate theses from aspects such as the management of graduation thesis writing, the process of thesis writing and teachers’guidance on thesis writing. However, no one has done research on English majors’graduation theses from the discourse perspective, especially from the point of structure and semantic coherence. Therefore, this thesis will study the general quality of English majors’graduation theses based on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory, supported by semantic coherence.In view of my research, three questions are put forward:(1) What is the general situation about English majors’graduation theses from the perspective of cohesion and coherence?(2) What kind of errors in cohesion and coherence are found in their theses?(3) Does it have any connection between the application of cohesion&coherence and the quality of those theses?Then, this research chooses40English majors’ undergraduate theses of Nanchang University of2003and2010as corpus. Each thesis is analyzed to find the inappropriate use of cohesive devices, which are further sorted out and explicated. In addition, the author also analyzes the semantic coherence of each thesis and between paragraphs and sentences from the perspective of macrostructure.It was found in the present study that the general quality of those40theses is good. The problems found out are concentrated on six of those theses, others contain only a small amount of errors. The statistics shows that the inappropriate use of conjunctions takes the greatest percentage, followed by reference, lexical cohesion, ellipsis and substitution. As to the macrostructure of each thesis, the incoherent paragraphs and sentences also take a large percentage. The author explores the factors for those problems and proposes that poor language ability, lacking in writing skills, negative transfer and inadequate supervision are the main causes. Focusing on those causes, then the author gives some suggestions on ELT, students’learning of writing and school supervision department, hoping that those suggestions will take effect on improving the quality of English majors’undergraduate theses and enhancing their language competence, writing ability and research capability.However, this research also exist some deficiencies. Firstly, the limitations of the chosen corpus confine the representativeness of this research. Secondly, as a foreign language learner of English, the author’s language level is also inadequate, which confines the analysis of corpus to achieve perfectness.At last, the author hopes that this research can arouse more learners’interest to conduct research on English majors’undergraduate theses from more extensive perspectives.