（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）对大学英语专业学生毕业论文的语篇错误分析.pdf

iv 摘摘 要要 第二语言习得是一个复杂的过程，在这个过程中学习者会犯一些错误。对这 些错误的研究一直为国内外的研究者所热衷。然而，他们的研究主要把目光投向 中低水平的学习者，研究范围也大都局限在词或句子层面上。英语专业高年级学 生这样高水平的学习者在语篇层面上所犯的错误则很少被提及。本论文对 30 名 英语专业学生毕业论文中出现的语篇错误进行了分析。 被选取的这 30 篇论文被按照不同的专业方向，完成时间和论文方向进行了 分类，找出错误共 267 个。其中 200 个属于语篇层面上的错误，占总错误数的 75%。这 200 个语篇层面上的错误又被分成了两大类：微观层面语篇错误（衔接 上的错误）和宏观层面语篇错误（篇章结构组织上的错误） 。它们在数量上分别 是 129 和 71。衔接上的错误被归纳为四个方面：指称对象，替代和省略，连接 词，词汇衔接错误。数量上分别是 34，19，32 和 44。篇章结构组织上的错误被 分成了五类：语篇范畴的混淆（20 个） ；语篇前后不一致（23 个） ；语篇歧义（4 个） ；语篇中的过度概括（10 个）和语篇研究对象的转移（14 个） 。对这些错误 的具体描述和分析出现在了本论文的主体部分。 本论文只是对英语专业学生毕业论文中语篇错误的一个尝试性分析， 希望这 些有限的研究和发现能够引起英语专业学生们的关注， 在写作的过程中能多注意 其论文的逻辑性，及时避免一些可以预见的语篇错误。 关键词：关键词：错误分析；语篇分析；语篇错误；英语专业学生毕业论文 ii abstract second language acquisition (sla) is a complex process, during which learners produce a large number of errors. the study of errors has been carried out by many researchers at home and abroad. however, their research focuses chiefly on data collected from elementary and intermediate learners, and at the word level and the sentence level. the errors at discourse level made by the advanced learners have seldom been mentioned. this thesis aims to analyze the errors at discourse level in the 30 sampled theses made by the undergraduates majoring in english. the 30 sampled theses may be divided according to different categories, such as branches of learning, year of issuing and fields of writing. 267 errors are selected from the 30 theses. among them 200 errors have been found at the discourse level, which take up 75% on the whole. the 200 errors at discourse level are divided into two categories: discourse errors at micro-level (cohesion errors) and discourse errors at macro-level (text organization errors). the former is 129 and the latter is 71 in number. the cohesion errors are classified into four aspects: reference, substitution and ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. the errors are 34, 19, 32, 44 respectively in number. and the text organization errors are divided into five categories: text organization errors in category mixture (20); text organization errors in inconsistency (23); text organization errors in ambiguity (4); text organization errors in overgeneralization (10); and text organization errors in subject-shifting (14). iii detailed description and explanation about each error with examples are presented in the main body of the present thesis. the current research is only an attempt to find out the errors at discourse level and their classification from which some findings may be drawn. what i hope is that my research and findings can arouse the english majors attention, consideration and logical thinking in coping with their theses as a whole. key words: error analysis; discourse analysis; errors at discourse level; undergraduates theses viii list of tables table 1 branches of learning in the sample21 table 2 year of writing in the sample.22 table 3 fields of writing in the sample.22 table 4 categorization of errors in the sample23 table 5 cohesion errors.24 table 6 reference errors.24 table 7 categorization of text organization errors.25 table 8 substitution and ellipsis errors.31 table 9 conjunction errors.34 table 10 lexical cohesion errors38 ix list of abbreviation sla second language acquisition ea error analysis l2 second language l1 first language wse world standard english tem test for english majors i acknowledgements i am greatly indebted to a number of people. without their help, this thesis would not have been finished. i would like to express my gratitude, appreciation, and thanks to them. firstly i am most grateful to my supervisor qu yanna. i owe her special thanks for the reason that her invaluable suggestions, insightful comments and painstaking corrections have contributed a lot to the completion of this thesis. secondly, sincere thanks go to all the teachers who teach me in the field of applied linguistics. their lectures enlightened me on my interest of applied linguistics and greatly widened my horizons. and lastly, my genuine thanks must be given to my family and my friends, who provided me with great consolation and support. 1 chapter 1 introduction 1.1 background of the present study second language acquisiton (sla) is a complex process, during which learners produce a great number of errors. these errors have been studied by many researchers not only at home but also abroad. however, their researches focus primarily on data collected from elementary and intermediate learners, and at the word level and the sentence level. the discourse level errors made by the advanced learners have seldom been mentioned in recent years. it is natural that error analysis (ea) is studied at elementary and intermediate levels since it is quite easy and convenient for researchers to collect large corpus of errors from the learners at these two levels. in addition, the elementary and intermediate learners are characterized by highly localized morphological errors, involving articles, prepositions, tenses, mood, etc, therefore, error analysis is mainly conducted at the word and sentence level. then, what kind of errors advanced learners make if they do any? studies of both written and spoken prouction show that advanced learners still make errors of several types: word level, sentence level and discourse level. and the academic writings of error analysis concerning the advanced learners are relatively few, especially the errors made in the area of writing. writing is one of the most important skills in foreign language learning. chinese college students have always been regarding english writing as difficult. even those without serious grammatical errors or misspellings, impress on readers incoherence and illogicality, which mainly result from the errors at 2 the discourse level. discourse error analysis can be helpful to improve students writing skill and their ability to communicate. by applying error analysis theory and discourse analysis theory , the author wants to make an analysis of the errors made by college unergraduates majoring in english in their theses from the discourse perspective, and attempts to put forward some suggestions for the language learners on how to avoid discourse errors in the process of writing thesis. 1.2 significance of the study in college english teaching, the writing course has always been seen as important and difficult. in the theses of undergraduates majoring in english, even in those with few mistakes in vocabulary and grammar, a serious problem is that they usually give readers an impression of incoherence. such incoherence in discourse level results from discourse errors or non-english discourse pattern in the students theses. discourse errors are more serious than those other levels, for they cause a failure of communication, even misunerstanding and cultural shock. as richards (2000) has noted, when learners violate norms of conversation in the target language, the violations are potentially much more serious than syntactic or pronunciation errors. good writers not only have strategies for correcting problems such as word choice, grammar and punctuation, but also have the ability to deal with the overall content and meaning of the writing by organizing a proper discourse. teaching written discourse can help students write logically, coherently amd smoothly, so that it will be easier to read and understand the written theses. an analysis on discourse errors can 3 help improve students writing skill and their ability to communicate. many english teachers and researchers devote themselves to adopting the error analysis to analyze the errors appearing in college students writing, and achievement has turned to be fruitful. but most of the researches focus on the analysis of grammatical errors and misspellings in the english writing pieces. so far, seldom have people made researches to reveal the discourse errors in writng an english thesis by chinese college undergraduates majoring in english. the present thesis will make tentative efforts in exploiting the point and do a further study on discourse errors. 1.3 objectives of the present study the objective of the present study is to show the various discourse errors made by college undergrauates majoring in english during the process of learning english as a second language. in spite of their relative high level of english fluency and proficiency, college english majors theses usually give readers an impression of incoherence and illogicality. the error analysis at discourse level is expected to offer us evidence on the potential existence of abundant errors at the discourse level in college english mojors theses. through a detailed analysis of the error data, some suggestions are put forward for english teachers and majors in college english teaching and learning. 1.4 overall structure of the thesis this thesis consists of five chapters. chapter one is the brief introuction to the 4 whole thesis, including the background, significance, objectives, and the overall structure of the present study. chapter two reviews some theories about the discourse analysis, error analysis and the previous studies of related issues. chapter three completely describes the methodology of the study, including hypothesis, subjects, instruments of the research, and data collection, results of the research. chapter four is the most key body of the study. in this chapter, the author makes a detailed analysis of the data collected, after that, some implications have been given for further learning and teaching. chapter five is conclusion. it summarizes the major findings of the study and then discusses its limitations. in the end, suggestions for further study are put forward. 5 chapter 2 literature review 2.1 discourse analysis there are two types of discourse analysis, grammarians and text linguistics. the former one is used to study isolated sentences, and the latter one is used to study discourse in communcation. traditonal grammar inclines itself into sentences or some smaller parts; it neglects the relationship between sentences and sentences. however, one word in different sentences has different meanings, as well as one sentence in different discourse. without context and using situation, it is difficult to define the communicative function of languages. otherwise, more and more linguists realized that the study of languages should not be confined on the sentence level, and they become more and more interested in discourse analysis, so discourse analysis comes naturally. according to mccarthy (1991, p.5), discourse analysis is the examnation of language used by members of a speech community and concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used. discourse analysis aims to account for language use in its affective, cognitive, situational and cultural contexts. it is a general term for the study of how sentences are connected together from larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversations, interviews, etc. discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the context in which it is used. discourse analyisis first appeared in zelling harris paper “discourse analysis”, 6 in this paper harris pointed out “language does not occur in stray words or sentences but in connected discourse” and “interpretation of sentences depends largely on the understanding and processing of a whole text”. then many famous scholars engaged themselves in this study, such as halliday and hasan(1976). it is because of all their contributions that discourse analysis can grow quickly into a wide-ranging and heterogeneous discipline. british discourse analysis was greatly influenced by m.a.k.hallidays functional approach to language. while american discourse analysis was dominated by work within the ethnomethodological tradition, which emphasizes the research method of close observation of groups of people communicating in natural settings. text grammarians consider texts as language elements string together in relationships with one other that can be defined. after about forty years evelopment, discourse analysis has made a valuable contribution to our unerstanding of how language works. what is more, it is playing more and more important roles in applied linguistics, especially in language learning and teaching. in china, it is not a long history since discourse analysis was introduced into our country. however, it develops very fast. today there are many linguists who are engaging in this field, and they contribute many works for us, such as huang guowen (2001), hu zhuanglin (1994), zhang yinglin (2006), and so on. 2.1.1 discourse and text genarally speaking, scholars from different perspectives may come to have 7 different interpretations on a certain term. it is the same case with defining the terms discourse and text. the actual use of the two terms “discourse” and “text” brings about some confusion, which is primarly ue to the various definitions given by linguists. some linguists quote the term “written” and “spoken” to separate “text” from “discourse”. they consider text as a sequence of written elements, while discourse is viewed as spoken passages. brown (2001, p.42) defines discourse as conversation which is a universal human activity performed routinely in the course of daily living. brown and yale (1983, p.6) perceive “discourse” as process of communication, and “text”, referring to the verbal record of a communicative act, as the representative of discourse. the most quoted definition of “text” is found in halliay and hasan. “the word text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does from a unified whole” (haliday while coherence is in the mind of the writer and the reader: it is a mental phenomenon. the cohesive ties as an essential condition that creates coherence, and cohesion helps readers establish connections between sentences. this thesis adopt the classification of cohesive ties given by halliday and hasan. 2.1.2.2 discourse analysis at macro-level: text organization writing smoothly requires not only the effectiveness of the sentences but also the effectiveness of the whole text which refers to a sound textual structure. ding (1994, p.82) emphasizes unity, coherence and transition in the effective structure of paragraphs and texts. summing up their viewpoints, sound textual structure should consist of the following qualities: (1) some words, sentences or ways of expression belonging to different categories cannot be mixed together within one discourse, though they are grammatically correct; (2) the former parts of the discourses should be consistent with their latter parts; (3) those semantically confused errors should not exist in the discourse; (4) the author clains to do at the beginning of one discourse should be correspondent with what he/she does at the end of the same discourse; (5) the subject of the authors research should not shift from the original one to another, or from an individual to the group in the discourse development. 11 though halliday and hasan (1976) emphasize the function of cohesion in texture excessively, they admit that texture involves the “macrostructure” of the text which establishes it as a text of a particular kind-conversation, narrative, lyric and so on. hu (1994) accents the “macrostructure” of the text in addition to cohesion and coherence. he views that the study on the macrostructure be carried out with the specific type of text such as narrative, argumentative, or poetic. with the increased interest in writing for various purposes, the specification of genre is important, and genre analysis is especially significant of the study on text organization. she expects that the increased interest in genre-based research will soon stimulate further research on superstructure of different kinds of texts. 2.2 error analysis wang (2000) points out that the technique of error analysis has been used by teachers in an informal way long before the concept of error analysis took place. however, as a new scientific technique based on psycholinguistics in the field of applied linguistics, it was developed in the late 1960s. in the 1950s and 1960s, the favored technique used in the study of errors made by l2 (second language) learners was contrastive analysis (james, 1998, p.4). contrstive analysis stressed the interference of the l1 (first language) on l2 learning. according to contrastive analysis, errors occurred primarily as a result of interference when the learner transferred native language habits into the l2. interference was believed to take place whenever the habits of the native languages differed from those 12 of the target language. by the late 1960s, however, some doubts about the reliability of contrastive analysis began to be voiced. contrastive analysis turned out either uninformative or inaccurate because errors did show up where contrastive analysis had not predicted. first language interference, which can only explain a small portion of the learners errors, cannot be considered as the sole source of errors. error analysis, examining errors attributable to all possible sources, became an alternative. according to rod ellis (1994), error analysis is a type of bilingual comparison between lear