The Application To Discourse Error Analysis On English Writing In Senior High School

In senior high school, teaching English writing has paid much attention to vocabulary, grammar and grammatical sentences, while less attention to discourse.Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to improve senior high school students' English writing ability through analyzing discourse errors made by them in their English writing.Based on the theory of discourse error analysis, 83 students are chosen as the research subjects, who are all from two classes in Grade Two in No.2 Dongyang Middle School in Zhejiang province. This paper tries to collect discourse errors in terms of cohesion and coherence in students' English writing through pre-experiment and post-experiment. Along with questionnaires for students and interview with teachers, this paper tries to solve three questions: 1. What is the current situation of English writing in terms of discourse strategy in senior high school? 2. What kinds of discourse errors appear more frequently in senior high school students' writing?What are the main reasons? 3. Can discourse error analysis influence the English writing proficiency of senior high school students? The author uses Excel and Spss19.0 to count the numbers of discourse errors in students' writing, discusses the reasons of discourse errors, and then gives some targeted teaching strategies to improve students' English writing performance in senior high school.After the research, this paper finds out that the English writing ability of experimental class is much better in the post-experiment than in the pre-experiment( P=0.000<0.05). And the English writing ability of experimental class is much better than that of controlled class( P=0.039<0.05). However, there is not much difference in the English writing ability of controlled class between pre-experiment and post-experiment( P=0.071>0.05). After the research, this paper also finds out that conjunction usage is the most serious problem in terms of cohesion, because students are not used to using it. In terms of coherence, errors mainly lie in using structure in topical coherence and sequential coherence. After analysis, the author finds out that all these problems have a close relationship with native language interference. That is, Chinese thinking pattern have a great effect on using conjunctions, thus causing problems of coherence in English writing. Based on all these reasons, this paper offers some constructive suggestions on teaching writing about discourse- teachers' explanation, students' exercises and teachers-students' evaluation to develop students' awareness about discourse and then to improve their writing ability.