An Empirical Study Of Teaching College English Writing From The Perspective Of The Event-domain Cognitive Model

English writing is one of the basic skills that EFL learners have to master, and also it is paid much attention to by scholars both at home and abroad. A review of the studies on EFL writing shows that scholars explore EFL writing from the perspectives of transfer, writing strategies, cohesive devices, thematic progression and process approach. Meanwhile, current researches on EFL writing instruction aim to enhance learners’ writing proficiency by improving their verbal fluency. Although some achievements have been produced, there still remain some shortcomings. In recent years, many scholars have been taking advantage of some related theories in the field of Cognitive Linguistics (shortened as CL), such as, the Prototype Theory, the Metaphor View and the Principle of Cognitive Reference Point to explain foreign language teaching. However, few scholars have discussed EFL writing based on the principle of the Event-domain Cognitive Model (shortened as ECM).In light of the insufficient researches of the previous studies, this thesis conducts an empirical study under the framework of ECM based on the background of CL in the hope of finding some effective methods of improving students’ English writing proficiency. The author selects90sophomores of non-English majors from Sichuan International Studies University as the subjects. Firstly, they are asked to do the exercise of CET-4, and based on the scores they achieve in the exercise,30students with approximately comprehensive competence are selected as the further subjects. Secondly，they are required to write a composition as the pre-test. And after as long as the three-month teaching of college English writing based on the principle of Event-domain Cognitive Model, they are required to write another composition as the post-test. Then their scores will be collected for further analysis by SPSS16.0. Finally, this thesis puts forward the research hypothesis that the construction competence of ECM is relevant to students’ writing proficiency，which is embodied by the following three aspects： 1) Can learners’ proficiency of theme analysis be improved by teaching college English writing based on Event-domain Cognitive Model?2) Can learners’ proficiency of thematic organization be improved by teaching college English writing based on Event-domain Cognitive Model?3) Can learners’ proficiency of syntactic construction be improved by teachingcollege English writing based on Event-domain Cognitive Model? According to this thesis, writing is more of a cognitive process, probablyinvolving different cognitive levels, such as, theme analysis, thematic organization and syntactic construction. Therefore, the writer is required to stimulate the knowledge chunk and classify the information text into different cognitive levels. On this basis, the author thinks that these three cognitive levels can just be embodied by ECM. Therefore, the research shows that learners’ writing proficiency can be improved by teaching college English writing based on Event-domain Cognitive Model, which can be revealed by clear and full ideas in theme analysis, unity，coherence and clearness in thematic organization and correctness，richness and flexibility syntactic construction. The author thereby puts forward some suggestions about college English writing in the hope of improving its efficiency.