A Study On Current Situation Of EAP Generic Competence Of Non-English Major Graduates

Along with the development of globalization,the internationalization of education,especially internationalization of higher education,has become an inevitable trend worldwide.Under such circumstances,cultivating innovative elite with broad international vision and high competitive capacity has become the focus of development and competition of the higher education.EAP(English for Academic Purposes)known as the medium of conveying and transmitting academic thoughts and research achievements plays a vital role in international academic communication,cooperation and competition.Accordingly,the EAP generic competence of graduates who are the high-quality reserving talents engaging in interdisciplinary academic studies has become an important impetus to promote innovation ability of graduates.Therefore,studies on EAP generic competence have been gaining attention among scholars both at home and abroad in recent years.This research,taking current situation of EAP generic competence of non-English major graduates as the object of study,attempts to explore the graduates’ needs for EAP genre knowledge,EAP generic competence of non-English major graduates,and influencing factors of EAP generic competence of non-English major graduates.Combining quantitative method with qualitative method,this research is carried out from three perspectives,involving 287 non-English major graduates,20 graduate English teachers and 20 graduate academic supervisors,to conduct questionnaires and interviews.SPSS 21.0 is employed to analyze all the data collected from questionnaires and interviews for descriptive analysis,correlation analysis,factor analysis and independent samples T-test.In order to further probe into EAP generic competence of non-English major graduates,a small-sized corpus with 30 interdisciplinary English abstracts in dissertations of non-English major graduates is established to make an analysis of generic structure based on Swales’ move-step analysis theory and academic words in AWL(Academic Word List)in virtue of Vocabulary Profiler.The major findings can be concluded as follows:(1)Non-English major graduates have urgent needs for EAP genre knowledge.They expect to acquire how to write up English academic research papers,academic reports,project applications etc,to be capable of reading and accurately translating various academic research literature,and to be able to participate in international communication and discussion in English.(2)With insufficient EAP genre knowledge and deficient application of EAP genre knowledge in practice,non-English major graduates demonstrate low EAP generic competence as a whole,typically in EAP writing competence.To be more specific,although graduates know about the fundamental EAP generic structures,they fail to organize ideas in sequence due to recurring coalescence,inversion and repetition of moves and steps;furthermore,the academic words in AWL(Academic Word List)of graduates’ EAP writing fail to reach the demands of EAP genre.(3)The influential factors of EAP generic competence of non-English major graduates include both internal factors and external factors.The internal factors consist of graduates’ English proficiency,EAP learning motivation,and EAP genre knowledge;the external factors are constituted by graduate English teaching elements such as English teaching contents,teaching methods,teaching materials and EAP course design,evaluation of graduates’ academic competence,and academic environment.Based on aforementioned research findings,some pedagogical suggestions are provided for graduate EAP teaching and learning with an expectation to improve current situation of EAP learning of non-English major graduates.