English Major Factors Affecting Students' Writing Skills

Teaching English writing in a college in China is always a most arduous task. The teachers' hard-work may very often result only in complaint or inefficiency. To better this, teachers and their students have to cooperate well to make the teaching and learning easier for them.To strengthen the teaching-learning cooperation, both teachers(as guiders) and students(as initiative learners) should fully understand the functions of the different phases in the teaching-learning process, then to distinguish the different factors influencing the process. Among all the factors, some are likely to be more dominating, namely, paper framing, language proficiency, thinking, mind state and writing environment. This paper tries to make a further study on the above five factors:paper framing, language proficiency, thinking, mind state and writing environment.Since the first two factors, paper framing and language proficiency, are to affect the writing process more mechanically, they are regarded in this paper as'hardware' factors. While the rest three, thinking, mind state and writing environment, more easily changed, are regarded as'software factors' in this paper. With more surveys, interviews and case study, this paper sets particular stress on how paper framing, language proficiency, thinking, mind state and writing environment affect the writing abilities of the said learners, thus to clarify the relationships between the related factors, then to draw a solution for improving the writing abilities of college English-major learners in China.