ESP-based Study On The Status Quo And Needs Analysis Of College English Writing Learning For The Petroleum Undergraduates

In the context of international trade and cooperation, the national foreign language capability improvement and the requirement to meet the students’ study and future workplace and academic needs have become a vital task for college English writing teaching. Seeking to provide factual basis for a systematic college English writing course from the scope of English for Specific Purpose teaching, this dissertation unveiled the deficiency of the present college English writing instruction and learning for the petroleum majors and investigated the students needs in it to get prepared for the future career and academic development in Southwest Petroleum University. Both learning needs and target needs are analyzed. What’s more, the relationship between the students’ starting English proficiency and the English writing learning needs and that of the graduate career development and the English writing ability requirement are also analyzed. 206 effective paper questionnaires were collected from petroleum undergraduates grade 2012 and 43 from college English teachers while 54 graduates completed questionnaires online. Afterwards semi-structured interviews were carried out on line and telephone to 5 undergraduates, 4 teachers and 4 graduates for more explanation. 3 personnel managers of oil companies also accepted interview on their expectation and company requirement of the graduate’s English writing ability. Besides, documents from the national higher educational department, the College of Petroleum Engineering, the College of Foreign Languages and the major oil companies are employed to provide more understanding the gap between the present situation of college English teaching and learning and the needs and expectation from all aspects. All the statistical data were analyzed by SPSS 19.0 descriptively and inferentially while the documents collected from the Department of Higher Education, the College of Foreign Languages and the College of Petroleum Engineering are analyzed as needed.The main results showed that the overall situation of the present writing instruction provided by the College of Foreign Languages is unsatisfying. There is no individual English writing course provided, writing is taught as a minor part in the integrated course and is under emphasized. The students are passive and uninspired on English writing learning and the teachers are investing little in it for subjective and objective reasons. What’s more, both the college English teachers and the students agree on the students’ linguistic needs, logic needs and resource needs, but they hold different idea in meeting the needs, especially, the teachers feel inadequate in teaching college English writing in an ideal way because of the present situation, and ESP writing teaching seems much more worrying than remedy to the individual teachers and the College of Foreign Languages in the host university. Thirdly, the students’ starting English proficiency doesn’t affect their English writing learning needs while career development have a positive influence on it. Lastly the workplace English writing needs are mostly to fulfill the working communication like reports, memos, summaries, etc., and the academic English writing needs are more higher-demanded: to write academic papers, dissertations, reviews, etc.With the findings, it is recommended that an individual college English writing course with two levels designed on the basis of the students learning needs and the social needs be provided for the petroleum majors by qualified English teachers who have the ability, insight, passion and teaching pedagogy to help the students with different future development. The two levels of college English writing course includes a compulsive college English writing course training the basic English writing abilities to fulfill the general and workplace English writing needs and an optional English writing course instructing the academic English writing abilities. Meanwhile, the College of Foreign Languages should dismiss the old CET-oriented evaluation and take “helping the students’ future development” as the way of assessing college English writing course. Lastly, more learning resources like web-based English writing instruction and other activities should be provided to promote English writing learning in the students.