Developing College Students' Writing Competence In A Synthesis Approach

Given the importance of English as an international language, more and more people need to learn to write in English for occupational or academic purposes. The ability of English writing is especially an indispensable skill for college and universities students who will play an important role in international communication after graduation. Although the skill of writing has received more and more attention in English education in China, the poor quality of the students' achievement in writing always makes those involved unsettled. "Whatever the writing activity is, all teachers of English in China moan about the learners' inability to communicate inwriting.A student's writing problem may be due, at least in part, to the type and quality of writing instruction offered. Confronted with a variety of instructional methods, teachers must decide which will work best for their students. By exploring how the four approaches, namely Product Approach, Process Approach, Content Approach and Genre Approach can complement each other in terms of answering for the real situation of English learning and teaching in China, this paper proposes a synthesis approach to the teaching of English writing at college level. Suggested classroom procedures are demonstrated in which each approach plays a role in the whole process of composing.The paper is composed of five chapters.Chapter One indicates, as an introduction, the present situation of teaching writing in China, and evaluates research attempts to look into and solve problems in the teaching of writing. Then paper endeavors to develop a synthesis approach generated from all the four major conventional EFL writing approaches mentioned above.Chapter Two first discusses the power of writing that involves learning a newset of cognitive and social relations and the social roles it plays. Then the chapter analyzes the difficulties students encounter in writing by comparing the difference of spoken and written language, which falls on three categories: psychological, linguistic and cognitive ones. The chapter finally manifests the ultimate purpose of writing to enable students produce whole texts which form connected, contextualized, and appropriate pieces of communication.Chapter Three is a critical review of the four most prevailing approaches to the teaching of writing (product approach, process approach, content approach and genre approach). On these theoretical bases, features, classroom procedures, advantages and disadvantages of each approach have been examined which leads to the indication that each approach privileging and largely limiting its attention to a single element of writing. The four traditional approaches parallel four different compositional advantages. The product approach focuses on the lexical, syntactic features of a text, and discourse-level text structures, whereas the content approach focuses on the content input before writing. The process approach attends to the writer's composing behaviors; the genre approach concentrates on the reader, in the form of the academic discourse community.Chapter Four begins with a discussion of what a writer need to know in order to produce an effective piece of writing and points out that sticking to any one of the four approaches will not completely impart writing knowledge to students. Embracing the approach generated from the other dominate traditional approaches in writing teaching, synthesis approach prevails other approaches in the sense that the insights of product, process, content, and genre approaches are incorporated through synthesis approach rather than others mentioned. The teacher's role is discussed in this chapter before exploring how the four approaches can complement each other through suggested classroom procedures provided in the chapter. In the synthesis approach, process and audience awareness, linguistic knowledge and strategies for enriching content and revising composition are all taken into account.Chapter five serves as a conclusion epitomizing the application of the synt...