“学术英语写作”课程建设的探索与实践

“学术英语写作”课程是大连外国语大学英语学院内容语言融合课程之一。多年来课程团队遵循学生研究能力、学科知识和语言能力同步发展的原则,探索有效的教学模式,提升课程质量,本文概述了“学术英语写作”课程的基本情况,介绍了课程项目实践阶段的具体教学设计及教师对项目实施过程的管理方法。文章还分析了课程对学生研究能力、学科知识和语言能力的影响,以及对教师教学及科研能力的促进作用。本文对同类课程的建设有一定借鉴意义。

Instruction of Nominalization by Applying Enabling of POA

It is noticeable that the academic papers written by Chinese English learners are lacking in academic features largely due to their poor ability to use nominalization.Therefore,the instruction of nominalization in an academic English writing course is badly needed.The author conducted onesemester-long instruction of nominalization to 90 non-English majors under the guidance of the production-oriented approach(POA).This research demonstrated how to apply POA,specifically,the enabling procedure to the teaching of nominalization.By triangulating the data of students’interviews,learning journals and written output,and the data of 4 teachers’class observations and interviews,this study found that the accurate application of the three criteria of effective enabling contributed to the improvement of the quantity and quality of nominalization in academic writing.

Building a Bridge Between Authentic Learning and Service Learning： A Case Study From an English Technical Writing Class

In order to help technical/business writing students transfer their authentic learning experience to service learning practice, this study explores the relationship between authentic learning and service learning through a course research project at a small public university in southwestem Oklahoma, USA. The participants, a small group of technical writing students, engaged in writing a proposal targeting a real-life local problem as well as finding a solution. The study shows that authentic learning, such as writing the proposal for a real-world problem, can generate a potential solution while the service learning portion of the assignment （such as working with the community） can provide a specific real-life location for resolving the problem. The study also shows that the authentic learning experience can inspire the students to move further to serve the community and when students volunteer to help the local community implement the solution, a bridge between the authentic learning and service learning can be built, which can then lead to students＇ enhancement of all round real-life skills and of a sense of serving the community. Finally, the implications of the study for English language teaching in an authentic leaming context also will be discussed.

The Use of Amplifiers in the Doctoral Dissertations of Chinese EFL Learners

This paper reports a study into the use of amplifiers and amplifier collocations in the doctoral dissertations of Chinese EFL learners. A sample corpus of doctoral dissertations by Chinese doctoral students and a control corpus of doctoral dissertations by native speaker doctoral students were compiled and used for the analyses. Results showed that the overall number of amplifiers used by the Chinese students and the native speaker students were comparable. However, the Chinese learners overused totally, very and really and underused entirely and highly in their writing. Moreover, the Chinese learners tended to use more amplifier collocations than their native speaker counterparts. In particular, they tended to use clearly much more frequently to intensify the reporting verbs and to use the amplifiers to intensify the meaning of general adjectives in their writing. It was also found that many amplifier collocations used by the Chinese learners were congruent collocations. The findings may indicate a non-native style within Chinese learners＇ writing. We argue that Chinese learners overuse amplifiers and amplifier collocations in order to focus the reader＇s attention as well as to enhance the meaning of general adjectives. Meanwhile, the Chinese learners＇ mother tongue exerts a clear influence on their use of amplifiers and amplifier collocations. Pedagogical implications are also discussed within the paper.

Metadiscourse Use in L2 Student Essay Writing: A Longitudinal Cross-Contextual Comparison

This paper investigates developmental patterns of metadiscourse use in Chinese students’EAP writing in an English medium university,in comparison with English majors’EFL writing in mainstream state universities and L1 student writing in UK universities.Taking a longitudinal and cross-contextual perspective,the study explores corpora of L1 and L2 student writing gathered from three sources:EAP essays written by Chinese undergraduate students at an English Medium Instruction(EMI)university;argumentative essays written by English majors in the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL);and academic essays of English L1 students from the British Academic Written English(BAWE)corpus.Hyland’s(2005 a)model of metadiscourse was adopted to identify interactive and interactional devices in each corpus,and results were compared between different levels as well as across the corpora to reveal developmental features.Findings show marked differences in metadiscourse use between Chinese EMI students’EAP essays and English major students’EFL essays in mainstream state universities,whereas a similar pattern of use occurred in EAP essays and English L1 student academic essays.Significant changes were also found between different year levels in two L2 essay corpora.The findings suggest that metadiscourse use in L2 writing had developmental trajectories distinctive to different institutional contexts,with EAP instruction in the EMI institution having mixed effects on Chinese students’awareness and use of metadiscourse in essay writing.