An Exploration of a Systematic and Effective Mechanism of Delivering Feedback on EFL Student Writing

In China, it is widely believed that teacher feedback plays a crucial role in EFL writing course, exerting a great impact on the improvement of Chinese EFL students＇ writing abilities so that teachers have been required to deliver feedback on students＇ writings. Teachers, consequently, spare no pains to give feedback, expecting their students would make progress in their writing, but it seems that things go contrary to their wishes. Although there are various complicated factors contributing to the situation, one of the important factors lies in the teachers, a number of whom do not grasp a systematic and effective mechanism of delivering feedback on EFL student writing. Much importance has been attached to Chinese EFL student writing, however, rare attention has been paid to conducting research on concrete ways of delivering feedback on Chinese EFL student writing in China. Therefore, this paper serves to fill the gap, mainly devoting itself to exploring concrete methods of delivering teacher feedback on EFL student writing.

A Corpus-Based Study of Adverbial Connectors in Native and Non-native Students＇ Writing

In writing and speaking, adverbial connectors always play a part to connect different parts together at both semantic and syntactic aspects. For it is so important that a lot of scholars have made and are making a series of studies to their functions. On the basis of corpus-based study, this paper firstly makes a comparison to the usage of adverbial connectors in their writings of the native students and non-native students and then exposes a distinctive gap between these two types of writings in usage of adverbial connectors. In order to help Chinese second-language learners acquire English as well as English native speakers do, this study deeply digs this gap and in further provides several pedagogical suggestions for English teachers and second-language learners.

An Analysis of Lexical Errors in Chinese Senior One Students' English Writing

Lexical errors made by language learners frequently in the language learning process play a significant role in language teaching and learning. This paper, based on the theory of error analysis, mainly analyzes lexical errors made by Chinese senior one students in their writing and aims to find out the main types of lexical errors and the most frequent lexical errors in their writing. The results are of great significance and importance for language teaching and learning.

SOME THOUGHTS ON A COURSE IN WRITING FOR ADVANCED STUDENTS

Two groups of advanced students (one, a class of 11 postgraduate students, and theother, a group of eight teachers) followed two separate but similar five month non-creditcourses in writing and rhetoric given at the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languagesin the fall and early winter of 1979-80.

Teaching Writing Contrastively： Contrastive Rhetoric in the Teaching of Writing

Writing fluently and expressively in English is a necessary skill for communication, as well as a required skill for Chinese students at the tertiary level. Since college students have already been trained on their Chinese writing skills for a considerable length of time and are able to write in Chinese quite successfully, the application of contrastive rhetoric in the teaching of English writing is very effective. This paper explores the possibility of teaching English writing to Chinese students at the tertiary level and proposes an approach to this teaching model.

Teaching the Non-Chinese Speaking Students Origami to Improve Their Interest and Concentration in Learning Chinese Language

The difficulties in learning Chinese faced by non-Chinese students are the subjects of concern in the education sector, especially in writing Chinese characters. We write the characters with strokes and dots, more or less strokes or dots will represent different words and different meanings. Students found these very complicated and confused, thus it leads them to lose their motivation and interest in learning Chinese language. From the beginning of the 1990s, I began using origami as one of the activities to promote the teaching of Chinese in the state school in Melbourne Australia with remarkable results. Program got widely reported by Medias. In 1995, I got the ＂National Excellence in Teaching Awards＂. After I took up the position as the curriculum development officer in University of Hong Kong in 2007, I worked closely with the teachers and students using origami as the theme base learning in Chinese. It helps to increase their understanding of the radicals and parts, so as to improve their confidence in writing Chinese characters.

Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English Modes of Thinking and Its Effects on Discourse Organization in EFL Writing

Based on the contrastive analysis of Chinese and English modes of thinking, this essay analyzes from two aspects the effects of their discrepancies on the discourse organization of Chinese students ' English writing, then explains the fundamental reason for these effects and proposes that teachers should impart to students knowledge about the differences between Chinese and English mode of thinking so that Chinese students can be better helped to organize their compositions on the English discourse patterns and compose idiomatic English writings.

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.

PROVIDING THE STUDENTS WITH EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK IN THE WRITING PROCESS

This paper focuses on providing effective feedback for the students in the writing process.Excessivemarking is defective as it reduces their motivation,whereas minimal marking is recommended as itimproves their inner drive for writing.In addition,there are other forms of feedback,such as peerfeedback,comments and face-to-face discussions.The students are required to act on the feedback totheir own advantage.It has been proved that the proposed correcting method is time-saving,chal-lenging and efficient.

RAISING STUDENT'S AWARENESS ABOUT WRITING IN ENGLISH

In recent years, although college students have acquired ahigh level of proficiency in English reading, they have made verylittle advancement in English writing. This is due to the factthat inadequate importance is attached to writing in the teachingof English, and that students have rather vague ideas about therole of writing in foreign language learning and about the differ-ent discourse patterns existing between English and Chinese.Thus, this paper suggests that, in order to improve students’writing ability, two ways be adopted to raise students’ awarenessof learning to write: 1) integrating the product-oriented ap-proach with the process-oriented approach; 2) using students’reading as a writing source.

HELPING EFL STUDENTS LEARN TO WRITE THROUGH FEEDBACK

There have been a lot of complaints from theteachers who teach English writing in China on theheavy load of correcting students’ work and the low ef-ficiency involved.This article discusses the problemscaused by the traditional approach to teaching Englishwriting,and suggests that one way to improve stu-dents writing skills is to develop students’ composingprocesses,especially the process of revision.Based onresearch findings and the many-year teaching practice,the author describes some ways of helping studentslearn to write through using feedback effectively.