A Case Study On The Development Of Science And Engineering Undergraduates' Academic Writing Competence

In recent years,a number of universities in China have established elite undergraduate programs to cultivate excellent innovative personnel with international competitiveness and a global outlook.In these programs,students are required to use English to do their academic research.However,the traditional college English course is proven to be insufficient to meet the needs of the elite students.In this context,an EGAP course(level 1-4),namely,English for General Academic Purposes,was established in Beijing Institute of Technology.This paper makes a case study of an undergraduate in the elite program of BIT majoring in science and engineering.The present research aims to study how a science and engineering undergraduate develops his academic writing competence in EGAP course context,and how much he has developed through a face-to-face interview and analyzing his writing outputs from the perspectives of noun phrase complexity and genre awareness construction.Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied in this empirical study.The major findings of this study are as follows: firstly,the academic writing competence of the student has been greatly improved step by step within the EGAP course context;secondly,in the aspect of noun phrase complexity,the findings of this study agree with the developmental stages for complexity features hypothesis;thirdly,the comparative genre analysis of the two literature reviews writing outputs in Level 4 indicates that the student could transfer some generic features into his writings.Genre awareness was gradually shaped and developed during his 4 semesters' learning in the EGAP course context.The integration of academic literacy cultivation and language competence development can not only effectively promote students' academic English writing competence but also broaden their professional horizon and build up their confidence.