The Construction Of Online EST Writing Center For Non-English Doctoral Students Based On Needs Analysis

English for Science and Technology (EST) writing is an essential demand for non-English doctoral students in their international academic communication. This is an indispensable utensil by which researchers'academic achievement can be published by international academic journals, so as to fulfill the goal of communicating with scholars abroad. Meanwhile, the quality as well as the quantity of the publications in international authoritative journals is also a criterion to view the academic level and achievement of individuals, institutes, and even the whole country. Despite the EST writing course designed especially for non-English doctoral students in most universities, problems still arise one after another in EST papers, such as the interference of the native language, weak structure of the whole article, and improper thesis format. Some EST course instructors, therefore, have introduced a different approach—process-oriented approach into their teaching, the core theory of which resembles that of the writing center program long in existence abroad (especially in the United States). Now that some college English writing course researchers have already introduced writing center as a complementary tutorial section into instruction of college English writing, this paper mainly focuses on the website construction of online writing center targeted at non-English doctoral students'EST writing.The subjects of this study are the doctoral students from the Institute of Mechanical Science and Engineering, HUST (Huazhong University of Science and Technology). The survey is designed to find out information about their EST writing experience, the instruction they have so far received, and their acceptance of prospective services provided by online writing center. The author summarizes the prevalent problems in their EST writing, the means adopted by them to solve these problems, the instructions they have received, and moves on to analyze the non-English doctoral students'expectation of the online writing center.According to the statistics obtained from this survey, the most difficult factor held by students still lies with the appropriateness in language, and in dealing with this problem, most of the subjects choose to read relevant reference materials in quantities. At the same time, although most of those under survey have had previous EST writing instruction, there are only a small proportion of them who have had their EST paper published. This result shows that it is necessary to set up a writing center as a complementary tutoring facility, which may help with the practice of process-oriented approach. What's more, in response to the needs analysis, writing center can provide successful tutoring cases (if permitted by the tutees involved in these cases) so as to help relieve the sense of anxiety of the doctoral students with writing intention or writing project. As for the construction of the website, conceived according to principles of constructivism, the layout of information and the configuration of sources can be so devised that the principles such as individualization, contextualization and cooperation can be well reflected.