A Comparative Study Of Native- And Nonnative-speaking EFL Teachers' Evaluation Of Chinese Students' English Writing

Nowadays, EFL (English as a foreign language) writing programs for non-English major postgraduates in some Chinese universities are taught both by native English speakers (NES) and nonnative English speakers (NNS) with proficiency in English. However, there were few researches about this: Do these two groups of teachers have different perceptions of writing ability and thus different instructional goals in teaching writing? If so, what are the significant differences between them? This paper tries to explore these questions by analyzing and comparing native- and nonnative-speaking EFL teachers'assessments of writing produced by Chinese non-English major postgraduates. By analyzing teachers'writing assessments, we can investigate the kinds of writing competences to be stressed and teachers'different attitudes towards various writing competences in their perceptions of writing ability. And thus teachers'instructional goals and emphases of foreign language writing can be made clear.This paper includes two ways of study: the controlled way and the uncontrolled way. In the controlled way of study, 10 NES teachers and 10 Chinese teachers used a 10-point scale to rate 10 essays on the same topic written by Chinese non-English major postgraduates, then stated and ranked three reasons or comments for their ratings. The classification and analysis of the teacher's comments or reasons follow a coding scheme of writing competence established on the basis of the theoretical framework of writing competence. MANOVA shows no significant differences between the two groups of teachers in their holistic ratings for the 10 essays. Chi-square tests, however, show that the NES teachers attend more negatively in their criteria to rhetorical organization of textual competence and argument competence (illocutionary competence) but more positively to grammatical competence than do Chinese teachers, while the Chinese teachers attend more positively than the NES teachers to content knowledge and transition of textual competence. Compared with Chinese teachers, the NES teachers also focus on general grammatical competence in their second criteria and are more concerned with rhetorical organization of textual competence in their third criteria reasons, whereas Chinese teachers, compared with their NES counterparts, are more concerned with content knowledge in their both first and second criteria.In the uncontrolled way of study, more than 300 pieces of students'compositions evaluated by their own teachers, totaling 9 NES teachers and 11 Chinese teachers, were collected from ordinary teaching of Non-English Major Graduate Student English Course. The classification and analysis of teachers'comments made in students'essays continue to follow the coding scheme used in the controlled study. The results of chi-square tests of the frequencies of NES and Chinese teacher's comments in terms of 11 types of categorized writing competences on the whole confirm the findings of the controlled way of study.Besides, with the purpose of learning about teachers'instructional goals for teaching writing, and whether they were aware that writing is a cognitive process and further judged this competence in the process of writing, a questionnaire was employed for each participating teacher in both ways of study. Summarized information from questionnaires again confirms the findings of the two-way study about teachers'instructional goals and emphases. In addition, data analysis about teachers'perceptions of the competence in the cognitive process of writing in the questionnaire and the results of the uncontrolled study make up for the restriction of the controlled study. They show that more NES teachers than Chinese teachers report to be aware of such competence as one component of overall writing competence. Meanwhile, NES teachers are found to attend much more positively than Chinese teachers to such competence in their qualitative evaluation.The results of this study help teachers, students and policy makers to realize the underlying differences between the NES teachers and Chinese teachers in their perceptions of writing ability and thus their instructional goals for EFL writing. These findings might contribute significantly to the cooperation between NES teachers and Chinese teachers in teaching English writing to Chinese postgraduates; especially, Chinese teachers can gain more enlightenment from NES teachers to help their students master English writing competence well enough for international exchanges. Besides, this study also has certain pedagogical value in teaching English writing as a cognitive process and provides some insights for further researches.