Towards A Language Awareness Approach To The Teaching Of College English Writing

College English writing has always been a problematic area of college English teaching and learning, as has been demonstrated in the annual national CET Band Four and CET Band Six. Studies have been many concerning the nature of the problem and how to improve this situation, and the most useful effort towards the study of the problem up to date has been the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the first English language corpus designed to tackle the college English writing problem by including annotated authentic students'writing assignments in English proficiency tests. A careful study of CLEC shows that, in spite of the important achievements that have been made in improving instructional approaches to college English writing, lack of language awareness stands out to be a serious problem that all college English teachers have to face.Language awareness might be understood as a notion promoting the development in learners of an enhanced consciousness of and sensitivity to the forms and functions of language corresponding to both language usage and language use. It encompasses the concept of general language awareness and critical language awareness that emphasize, respectively, on the awareness of a wide range of linguistic systems or usages and on the awareness of the social functions or the use of language. Analysis of the students'writing in CLEC shows that failure in their writing can all be attributed to the lack of such awareness of the target language: students have problems with both the language forms and the intended functions of their writing. The National College English Curriculum requirements stipulate that college English learners attain a high level of knowledge about language, i.e. language forms, and such knowledge could be applied to practical language use in both work and academic studies, which is exactly what Language Awareness aims at.Statistical studies and data analysis of CLEC based on Language Awareness theories provide a detailed list of the problematic areas of both language usage and use, such as in word forms, word use, phrases, collocations, sentence structures, composition unity and coherence, sense of readers, and style, etc. The Language Awareness theory and the CET Band Four writing problem analysis naturally lead us to the development of a tentative Language Awareness approach to college English writing, which is the aim of this dissertation. Example activities and tasks are suggested along with the approach, such as discovering English, inductive learning of English, task-based activities, purpose-based writing, peer response and editing, and the employment of authentic teaching materials. It is hoped that such an approach, novel as it is, will be tried out for the improvement of college English writing.