The Composing Processes Of Six Chinese EFL Learners: An Exploratory Study

This thesis reports on a study of the writing processes of six Chinese non-English major EFL learners, the patterns of their conscious attention and the writing strategies employed in their writing processes. Students were asked to compose aloud on two tasks, narration and argumentation. They were videotaped as they wrote, with the camera focused specifically on the movement of their pen on paper. After the composing tasks they were interviewed about their writing processes, about what they had attended to during the pauses captured on videotape, and about their concepts of writing. The think-aloud protocols were transcribed and categorized with the help of the coding schemes adapted from previous studies in the field of writing research.Analysis of the protocols, supplemented with that of the follow-up interviews and their written products, led to some interesting findings about their composing process. The major findings can be summarized as follows:(1) The student writers differed significantly in their writing processes in spite of their similar educational backgrounds.(2) In their writing processes they attended to different aspects of writing. However, most of them seemed to lack a global view of writing. In addition, their attention patterns reflected that their writing knowledge was somewhat unbalanced.(3) The student writers employed a variety of writing strategies in their composing processes, among which the ones concerning the global control of writing accounted for fairly small proportions.Based on these findings, some implications were drawn for EFL writing pedagogy in China.