The Development Of "Scientific Writing" From Bachelor To Master

The academic writing is one key competence and one critical challenge for German language and literature students,nevertheless,how students can develop scientific writing skills in an effective way is particularly lack of attention and research.Specifically,certain researches aimed at academic writing skills of native-speaking students can be found to some extent,while researches concerning academic writing development of second language learners are fairly rare.In addition,most relevant studies are based on quantitative data statistics and analysis,as a result,it is quite urgent to conduct qualitative research that describes and analyzes the development process from the perspective of students.Under sucUnder background,this thesis primarily focuses on the academic writing development process of Chinese German language and literature students by means of their writing products and self-assessments.The empirical study is designed as a comparative corpus-based analysis based on students’ text corpus and the interview corpus.The writing product analysis concentrates principally on the academic language use of students’ texts.To research language use,the present thesis introduces five functional areas of academic text and the model of academic language use development proposed by Steinhoff,which provides significant theoretic support for the text analysis Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed in the data evaluation Interview corpus consists of four semi-constructed interviews,mainly paying attention to students’ self-assessments of their development and changes that occurred during their academic learning process.When it comes to data evaluation,the "qualitative content analysis" by Philipp Mayring is chosen as the methodology and "NVivo 11" as the analysis tool.Acording to the specific situation of students’ texts,the text product analysis results are presented in three functional areas,the author reference,the intertextuality and the concept formation.Research results support Steinhoff’s academic writing development model,the academic writing development is a process of adaptation to the academic context,whereby students’ language use continually approaches academic common sense At the same time,results demonstrate that academic language use of second language learners possesses certain characteristics in comparison with native language learners.The interview analysis results can be divided into three categories,namely,student cognition towards academic writing,actions of academic writing and the evaluation of one’s own academic writing product.Results indicate:(1)Not only the writing products but also the cognition and the writing action of students reflect a process of adaptation to the academic context;(2)An interactive relationship exists between these three categories On this basis,a model of the academic writing development circle is proposed,which intersected with Steinhoffs’ s development model to a large extent.The combination of two models leads to a new model for the development of academic writing,which offers a more concrete description of the academic writing development process.The development process of the academic text writing is a spiraling process driven by the interaction of four factors,namely,cognition,action,writing product and the evaluation of writing products.