A Study On English Writing Competence Of Non-English Major College Students

As one of the important parts of English competence,English writing competence is a comprehensive reflection of students' mastery of vocabulary,syntax,content and coherence,and so on.Based on the framework of Bachman(1990),a comprehensive study is carried out by employing a questionnaire,tests,and an interview to explore the present condition of college students' English writing competence from the perspective of its sub-components.The subjects are 239 students enrolled in 2013 from Xi'an Medical University.All data are collected and processed by SPSS 20.0.Firstly,the result of students' responses to the questionnaire shows that students have a rather negative view on their English writing competence.Secondly,according to the analysis of the test scores,the English writing competence of students are rather low.Furthermore,The results to some key components being studied are as follows:Firstly,students make few spelling errors in their papers,but they make more meaning errors and usage errors in practice.Secondly,the accuracy of simple sentences is rather high,but the accuracy of complicated sentences,including compound and complex sentences,is quite low.Thirdly,students do not have a good writing ability in terms of content and coherence.In summary,students are not quite confident in their English writing competence;they have a rather poor English writing competence and do not meet the requirements of the College English Curriculum Requirements issued in 2007.More precisely,students do not use words correctly in writing to some extent;students are not good at composing complicated sentences;and the writings of students are poor in content and lack coherence.Those results provides some suggestions for English teachers.Based on the Input Theory and the Output Theory,English teachers should adopt different teaching methods and pay more attention in their teaching to such aspects as word meaning and usage,complicated sentences,the basic knowledge of content and coherence to help students to learn the characteristics and ways of English paper writing.At the same time,teachers should provide more opportunities for students to let them practice and improve their writing competence.