Effective Mechanisms For Developing Students' Writing Competence

With China's further economic reform and opening-up policies to the outside world, international communications take place frequently between countries in many areas, such as politics, economy, culture, and foreign affairs. And a great part of publications, declarations, international conferences, contracts, and documents and so on are made in the form of written speech. Therefore, English writing is very important in the daily life. Like listening, speaking, and reading, writing is part of communication, and is also the weakest part of the four basic skills. At the present time, few college students write good English in their compositions, many of them are always making errors, and are frustrated in their attempts at written expression because of difficulty with the mechanical aspects of writing. The teacher of writing, therefore, needs effective ways of assisting students in overcoming the mechanical obstacles to writing.In the past 30 years many scholars of English writing have done a great deal of researches on composing processes and have established theoretical basis for using the process approach in L2 writing pedagogy. However, language proficiency and competence underlying the ability to write in the L2 is far from satisfactory. Therefore, L2 writingteachers should take into account both strategy development and language skill development when working with students. This paper mainly deals with some problems with English writing by college students, and explores errors made by students in their writing, also criticizes the traditional approaches and absorbs the merits of them. And finally, based on empirical teaching, the author proposes a revision-and-comment approach, aiming at improving students' writing competence through some strategies of revisions and comments.