| This paper sets out to examine college non-English majors' writing at textual level by an empirical study. Sixty subjects(30 freshmen and 30 sophomores) were chosen at random to take part in two writing tests. One was guided writing and the other free. As both College English Teaching Syllabus and the grading ctiteria for CET-4 emphasize richness in content, clarity in organization and coherence in expression, students' writing samples were collected and analysed in three respects: ideas, organization and coherence. It is found that non-English majors do have problems as far as the three respects are concerned.There are many reasons for the ineffective teaching and learning of writing at Chinese tertiary institutions. Theoretically speaking, we should consider four variables in L2 writing context: cognitive, social, cultural, educational(Grabe & Kaplan 1996). Practically speaking, the questionnaire and observation undertaken during the study also point to some weakness or problems on the part of students and on the part of teachers. Taking these two together into account, the paper focuses on such factors as influence of Chinese mode of thinking, learner's poor cognitive ability, negative washback of teaching approach and monotone and rigidity of writing test.Many language researchers have realized that the key reason for poor writing lies in the difference between Chinese and western mode of thinking, which can be found in at least two ways as far as writing at textual level is concerned. Firstly, English texts pay special attention to cohesion at surface structure and coherence in deep structure as opposed to Chinese texts which achieve coherence by the internal relation of sentences. Secondly, English passages usually develop in a linear way, with the main idea presented at the beginning and then developed hi detail, while Chinese passages develop in a spiral way, with the main idea developed in a round-about way.Cognitive ability refers to one's ability to think, memorize, recognize and classify.A person who is poor in cognition usually does not have rich information deposit in memory bank, lacks proper method to retrieve, activate his or her long term memory, or lacks sense of logic when organizing and classifying materials.As is revealed by the questionnaire, a large number of students find it difficult when they write either because they don't have anything to write about or because they don't know how to write. This results to a great degree from the negative washback of teaching approach. To begin with, due to the traditional Grammar-Translation method, reading, as a major way of information input, doesn't provide students sufficient information. Next, the school context in China has always attached great importance to reading while neglected writing and writing process. Last, writing instruction in China does not make good use of feedback, either peer feedback or teacher comment.In addition, the monotone and rigidity of the current writing test leads to the monotone of the teaching content, mislead teachers and students to guess on the topic, and inhibit students' creativity and thinking ability from developing.When it comes to what strategy to adopt to solve the problems, such related theories as textual analysis and the established teaching approaches are reviewed. Textual analysis has provided a solid basis for research in writing and writing instruction. Research on the various aspects of textual organization- such as topic progression, information structuring, discourse mode variation and logical relations among discourse units - has led to increasingly productive instructional practices.In the field of writing instruction, three approaches have been established: product approach, process approach, genre approach. The product approach thinks successful writing is based on one's linguistic knowledge and therefore emphasizes correct usage, correct grammar, and correct spelling, but it neglects the development of students' writing at textual level.The process approach is...
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