The Writing Processes Of Chinese College EFL Writers

In recent years, more and more people have realized the important role of writing in English language learning. The trend seems to have been reinforced by the inclusion of a writing test both in the English Proficiency Test for English majors and in the National College English Test for non-English majors, which in turn, has great influence on English teaching in China. Most English Departments start to offer English writing course from the freshman level. Yet, despite the strenuous efforts made by the teacher and the student, English writing is still the most challenging and threatening course for the majority of students. The most frequently heard complaints are: 揑 can抰 think of what to say.?揑 don抰 know how to get started.?揥hy do I have to write??etc.. One major fact accounting for these complaints is that our teaching practice still falls back on the traditional product-centered approach in which students perceive no interest and utility in their writing. Within the classroom, 搘riting appears to be a set of rules and modules for the correct arrangement of preexistent ideas? Hayes, J. R. and Flower, L. S. 1977, p.449). The teacher抯 usual practice was: exposing the students to the formal descriptive categories of rhetoric, asking them to imitate model passages, and then correcting errors in students?composition with regard to organization, grammar and vocabulary. Yet such practice seems to have ignored everything we have learned from the recent Li and L2 processresearch findings which have shown that writing is a complex interplay of social-contextual, affective, and cognitive factors. The writing process is also a meaning-discovering, problem-solving process. It is recursive and non-linear. While writing, students exhibit a variety of behaviors such as generating ideas, planning, reviewing, revising, and editing. Skilled writers tend to display different writing behaviors and processes from unskilled writers.The central concern of the present thesis is to explore the different features of the writing process of both skilled and unskilled Chinese college EFL writers. It consists of six major sections. The first section introduces the process I product distinction that informs much of the current research on writing. The second section provides a theoretical discussion of the various factors involved in the writing process, namely, the social-contextual factor, the affective factor, and the cognitive factor in an attempt to arrive at a feasible framework for the present study. The third section reviews the related literature concerning the writing process of both skilled and unskilled Li and L2 writers. The fourth section outlines the design of the present investigation. The fifth section presents the research findings elicited from the think-aloud session, the collected questionnaire, and the face-to-face interviews on the writing process of the eight Chinese college freshman writers (including four skilled and four unskilled writers). Research does show that skilled writers tend touse more efficient writing process and strategies than the unskilled writers. And the last section concludes by advocating writing teachers to take into consideration the specific needs of the unskilled writers and to effect intervention throughout their writing process.It is hoped that this thesis will get the college writing teachers to have a better understanding of the processes and difficulties EFL writers encounter in their endeavor to compose and more importantly, to think of effective ways to accommodate to their needs and to facilitate their writing process.