A Study Of The Application Of Project-Based Learning In English Writing Teaching For Non-English Majors

College English writing,as an important reflection of communicative competence,has become an indispensable ability for contemporary college students.However,the writing level and ability of students do not meet the requirements of college English syllabus as a whole.The traditional teaching methods put too much emphasis on the results of writing and ignore the cultivation and training of writing ability and skills,which not only lead to the failure of substantial improvement of students' writing proficiency,but also lose interest in English writing.Therefore,it is imperative to explore an effective teaching method to improve college students' English writing proficiency.In this study,project-based learning is applied to college English writing teaching to answer the following two research questions:1.What are the effects of project-based learning on students' writing proficiency from the aspects of relevance,explicitness,sufficiency and coherence?2.What are the changes of students' attitudes towards college English writing after the application of project-based learning?The researcher conducted a one-semester experimental teaching at a university in Liaoning province.The study included 60 students from two sophomore classes of non-English majors.One of them was an experimental class,accepting the PBL for teaching.The other class was a control class,employing traditional writing method.The researcher adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative researchmethods,tests,questionnaires and interview as instruments.And in the meantime,all the collected data were analyzed by SPSS 17.0 software.The study demonstrates that PBL has a great influence on college English writing for non-English majors.The post-test results show that the students' English writing scores in the EC has improved as a whole.In addition,the students' compositions have significantly improved in the aspects of explicitness and sufficiency.The results of the questionnaires and interview manifest that the students have a more positive change in their attitudes towards college English writing.This study also provides some suggestions and research directions for college English writing teaching.