An Investigation Of Problems In Art-major Students’ English Argumentative Writing

As one of the standards of language proficiency, English writing competence is of great significance to university students. The requirement for writing ability is clearly presented in College English Course Requirements(2007) that university students should be able to "write a composition that is of complete content, clear main idea, proper diction and coherent discourse". As English writing gains its importance in various exams, it has attracted more attention from scholars and researchers, giving rise to many studies concerning EFL(English as a Foreign Language) learners’English writing. While these studies are mainly focused on writing instruction, error analysis and so on for all non-English majors, few are done for art-major students. Studies concerning exclusively to English argumentative writing is much rarer.Therefore, this study placed its lens on the major problems of argumentative writings produced by art-major students and factors affecting students’writing competence. To investigate the problems existing in their writings,20samples written by the2012year freshmen majoring in Fine Art in Central China Normal University(CCNU) were carefully analyzed. Meanwhile, a questionnaire concerning the difficulties and causes was distributed among students both majoring in Music and Fine Art. The following are the research questions:1) What are the major problems in art-major students’English argumentative writings?2) What difficulties do art-major students encounter during the process of writing?3) What are the factors affecting their writing competence?It was concluded that linguistic problems including lexical errors and grammatical errors are quite common in students’writings. Lexical errors such as misuse of part of speech, misuse of synonyms and collocation errors are the most frequent errors, and followed is grammatical errors including disagreement in subject and predicate, incomplete sentences and non-finite verb errors. What’s more, discourse errors are focused on the usage of cohesive devices, such as conjunctions and reference. Meanwhile, non-linguistic problems occurred frequently even if the fact that students themselves fail to recognize it. Most of the students have problems in writing English argumentative writing which is clear in structure and rich in content. This is because students are unfamiliar with the features of argumentative writing and teachers put undue emphasis on linguistic errors, making the students neglect the non-linguistic ones. Moreover, unscientific writing strategy is the most direct factor that affects students’English writing competence.The underlying reasons stem from the traditional method of teaching, which overlooks the instruction of writing strategies concerning pre-writing, while-writing and post-writing. Besides, the statistical results show that students’writing motivation, writing instruction and teacher’s feedback are the other two commonly endorsed factors that affect students’English writing competence.This research suggests that the teachers should enhance the instruction of English writing strategies, and students should also make efforts to improve English writing competence.