The Implications of Differences in Chinese and American Discourses in English Writing Teaching in Universities and Colleges in China

Abstract

There are differences between Chinese and American discourses due to differences in cultures and modes of thinking, and they are of great significance to English writing teaching in universities and colleges. Differences between Chinese and American discourses not only brought many opportunities to English writing teaching, but also difficulties are increased in English writing teaching in universities and colleges. Chinese is hypotaxis in discourse and English is parataxis in discourse, and these discourse differences between Chinese and English are also reflected in cohesions such as the use of substitutions, ellipsis and conjunctions. These differences will directly have influence on English writing teaching and learning effect in universities and colleges, so that this paper aims to provide some guidance for English writing teaching in universities and colleges through the comparison of Chinese and American discourse differences. This paper is a documentary and qualitative research. It can be resulted from the paper that Chinese and American discourse differences are caused by differences between Chinese and American cultures and modes of thinking, and teachers should make full use of these differences to cultivate students' consciousness of discourse cohesions in order to help them write authentic English passages. Keywords-English writing teaching; discourse differences; Chinese and American; universities and colleges