非英语专业学生英文写作中语篇迁移-外国语言文学;外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

I I Acknowledgements I’m grateful to my supervisor Ouyang Junlin, who offered his enlightening suggestions and advice and warm-hearted encouragement throughout the preparation and composition of this dissertation. Without his help, this dissertation could hardly be accomplished. I’m also grateful to the teachers who taught me during my three-year study, especially Professor Cheng Xianfu and Professor Zhang Derang for their comments on the outline of my thesis, and Professor Sun Shengzhong for his lecture on the MLA style. Last but not least, I’d like to express my gratitude to my colleague, Miss Chen Jinglin, who kindly helped collect sample compositions and other relevant data from her class. II II Discourse Transfer in Chinese Non-majors’ English Writing Abstract The discourse problems of EFL/ESL writing have long attracted language teachers and researchers. Researchers have explored the issue from different perspectives. This paper aims to study transfer in Chinese non-English majors’ English writing at discourse level. The study is conducted in light of transfer theory, contrastive analysis and discourse analysis. The writer first introduces the transfer theory and contrastive analysis, then compares and contrasts the writing conventions of English and Chinese. Contrastive rhetoric as an area of exploring the writing problems in SLA presupposes the transfer theory. Many contrastive rhetoricians believes that Chinese discourse patterns are characterized by induction and non-linearity as opposed to the English deductive and linear ones. To verify this belief and to investigate how transfer operates at both macro and micro level of discourse, 60 expository compositions written in English in one class and 46 samples of similar topic written in Chinese in another have been analyzed from the perspectives of the whole essay organization, paragraph development and cohesion. A comparison of both groups of the essays in terms of macro features confirms this belief. It i