A Study Of Chinese Postgraduates' (Non-English Major) English Writing At Advanced Level

The paper is written to serve two purposes. On the one hand, it aims to identify what handicaps Chinese students from achieving effective L2 writing at the advanced level; on the other hand, it suggests practical implications for teachers to solve the correlative problems.The goal of English teaching is to broaden the students' knowledge in English, to offer them overall skills, and to improve their practical ability to use English idiomatically. Writing, as a comprehensive reflection of learners' aptitude in L2 application, has been a weaker area of college students. Students' poor performances in L2 writing have aroused increasing concern of the teachers and students.As a matter of fact, L2 writing is a complex and dynamic process. In terms of macro approach, L2 writing research has been closely connected with a number of related fields such as second language acquisition, English teaching, cross-cultural communication, and discourse analysis. In terms of micro approach, L2 writing has been affected by individual learner's differences such as language proficiency and the knowledge on the differences between English and Chinese writing styles.This dissertation, through investigations on postgraduates' writing activities in forms of sample collection, questionnaire and interview, proves that the deficiency in writing was resulted mainly from linguistic and cultural cognitive problems. Solution to the existing problems can be found in analysis of the purpose of higher education itself. Higher education should concentrate on the exploring and pursuing of advanced knowledge. Advanced knowledge forms the working materials for higher education. This principle shows that "writing in order to learn", "to inform" as well as "to communicate" should be emphasized in the teaching system of writing for postgraduates.To achieve the goals of higher education, this author ventures to suggest a streamline proposal, according to which students are to be exposed to extensive reading materials as well as critical, analytical, and systematic discussions so as to increase the input of both language and cultural content. This solution is helpful to realize the input and output of language as well as the acceptance, expansion and innovation in thinking. It is supposed to be an effective way to improve the efficiency of ESL teaching of writing.