Learning Needs Analysis Of Non-English Major Postgraduates’ English Academic Writing

Needs analysis is an essential part of course design of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The traditional teaching mode has taken a "top-down" way for many years in China, which means what students learn has been traditionally lying in the hands of the authorities. The gap between the students’ learning effect and teachers’ expectations is getting deeper and deeper, because the study on what the students want to learn and what the students lack is very little. Therefore, since the late1980s, some researchers and scholars have started to advocate the learner-centered approach.In recent years, more and more postgraduates try to improve their academic competence by publishing in key journals. However, they have met many difficulties in the process of writing. As a special learning group, non-English major postgraduates, their difficulties in English writing haven’t been attached great importance to, because people take it for granted that postgraduates are proficient in English. However, postgraduates’English proficiency is lower than what has been expected. One of the reasons is that most postgraduates passed CET4and CET6during the freshman and sophomore, and since then they rarely spent time on English learning, which leads to the declination in their English proficiency. Therefore, the author hopes that through this study, learning needs of the non-English major postgraduates in English academic writing could be focused on.This study was based on English Academic Writing Course at Southwest Petroleum University (SWPU) from September2013to October2013. It aimed to find out non-English major postgraduates’ learning needs in English academic writing, and whether their needs could be fulfilled after10weeks learning through questionnaire and interviews. In order to improve the students’English academic writing skills, some suggestions were put forward for improvement of English Academic Writing Course. This study was carried out in both quantitative and qualitative methods. The subjects of the study were140non-English major postgraduates of grade2013in SWPU, from class1and class2of the course. This study tries to interpret the following questions:(1) What are the postgraduates learning needs in SWPU? Through the study, what are the characteristics of students’ learning needs in each category:academic writing purposes, language needs, rhetoric needs, culture and discipline knowledge needs, and writing resources needs?(2) Can English Academic Writing Course in SWPU fulfill the postgraduates’learning needs in each category? If not, what kinds of learning needs should be improved? And what are the improvements of English Academic Writing Course in the future?The results showed that such factors as academic writing purposes, the use of language and rhetoric, culture difference in thinking, the lack of discipline knowledge and writing resources affected students’English academic writing. Due to the limited period of the course, the lack of cooperation teaching between English teacher and professional teacher, and lowness writing interest, the students’learning needs haven’t been fully fulfilled.