Qiya Hu ^1*

A class of normal-like derivatives for functions with low regularity defined on Lipschitz domains are introduced and studied. It is shown that the new normal-like derivatives, which are called the generalized normal derivatives, preserve the major properties of the existing standard normal derivatives. The generalized normal derivatives are then applied to analyze the convergence of domain decomposition methods (DDMs) with nonmatching grids and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for second-order elliptic problems. The approximate solutions generated by these methods still possess the optimal energy-norm error estimates, even if the exact solutions to the underlying elliptic problems admit very low regularities.