A Comparative Study Of Class Activities Used To Help University Students Develop Writing Strategies

Most university students as ESL learners in China are still not competent in English writing. This to some extent is related to the teaching of English writing in class. The aim of this study is to find out the kinds of class activities used by Chinese and foreign teachers to help students develop writing skills, the similarities and differences between the class activities used by Chinese and foreign teachers and the reasons causing those differences.The research subjects are 10 Chinese teachers and 10 foreign teachers. The research methodology is participant observation and questionnaires. Findings from this study are: the class activities used by both Chinese and foreign teachers are group discussion, group writing, controlled writing and exercises. The activities only used by Chinese teachers are students'presentation, daily notes, writing through e– mails; the activities only used by foreign teachers are dictogloss, free writing, rewriting long sentences, talking about the paper with students while in class, games and quote of the day.The class activities used by Chinese and foreign teachers have something in common. They are: the activities that focus on the"form"of language and involve other language skills apart from writing skill. The differences in the features of the activities used by Chinese and foreign teachers are the ways they deal with textbooks and the occasions on which group discussion is used.There are similarities and differences in the aims of the class activities used by Chinese and foreign teachers. The similarities are that through class activities both Chinese and foreign teachers want students to learn how to revise and evaluate writing and to grasp the form of a certain type of writing. They also want to help students learn to write sentences in terms of sentence structure, the length of sentence and sentence variety, and to help them improve writing by reinforcing exchange between them. The differences lie in that on top of those aims, Chinese teachers also hope that students can learn from each other, and that both students and teachers reflect on class teaching by means of class activities, while foreign teachers have the...