Study On Chinese College Students' Revision Behaviors In English Writing

This study aims to describe and analyze the characteristics of Chinese college students' English writing revision behaviors.The author records the writing processes of 82 research participants by keylogging software,and classifies and analyzes the students' revisions from four different perspectives in an attempt to make an objective and comprehensive investigation of the characteristics of writing revisions of Chinese college students,as well as the behavioral differences in different English proficiency groups.Four major revision types are firstly classified and then carefully counted and analyzed.In accordance with linguistic units,revisions are classified as revisions on word and phrase,revisions on sentence and revisions on text.Taking the type of action as a criterion,revision behaviors are classified into three types in this study,namely,insertions,deletions and substitutions.According to the orientation of the revision,revisions are classified into formal changes,meaning preserving changes,micro-structure changes and macro-structure changes.Regarding their temporal and spatial features,revisions are classified into revisions of burst-produced-so-far,revisions of sentence-produced-so-far,revisions of passage-produced-so-far and the revision after completion of the text.With the above four major division types of revisions,different features of Chinese college students writing revisions could be described and elicited multi-dimensionally.The study finds that,in average,Chinese college students do about 20.50 revisions every one hundred words.Moreover,the amount of revisions Chinese college students make is proficiency-dependent,and proficient students tend to make fewer revisions.In terms of units of revision,the amount of revisions on different linguistic units is divergent.The research finds in this study that Chinese college students make more word and phrase revisions than revisions on sentence level and text level.The present research also proves that the frequency of revisions in different linguistic units is proficiency-independent.Chinese college students tend to do similar amount of revisions in different linguistic units.As for the types of action,in general,substitution revision is the dominant revisions used by the students.Among five different substitutions,phrasing substitution occupied nearly half of substitution revisions.The present research further verifies that only insertion revision is proficiency-dependent among all types of revisions.The more proficient Chinesecollege students are,the more insertion revisions they tend to make.From the perspective of orientation of revision,students with different English proficiencies tend to make different amount of formal revisions and micro-structure revisions.The proficient students tend make fewer formal revisions and micro-structure revisions.Taking the revision temporal and spatial features into consideration,all students prefer to revise instantly rather than distantly.Revisions of burst-produced-so-far occur most frequently,while revisions after completion of text rarely occur.Except the revision of sentence-produced-so-far,students with different English proficiency make similar amount of other types of revisions.In all,this research verifies that Chinese college students' English proficiency affect the revision frequencies of specific types rather than all types,and the influence of L2 proficiency exerted on revision mode and content of revision is not as huge as some other studies suggest.