| In recent years, the publication of English research papers in international journals has become a graduation requirement for non-English major doctoral students, especially for those science students. However, they often encounter various kinds of difficulties and thus have many academic needs. Questionnaires, interviews and documents have been employed to find out doctoral students'academic writing needs. 10 students participated in the interviews and another 280 students completed a questionnaire, and the data collected was to identify students'target needs and learning needs in academic writing.The results showed that students meet with difficulties in terms of language,rhetoric, content knowledge and writing resources, but vary in degree, with language use the most difficult. Problems as vague expression, poor interpretation and excessive grammatical errors have severely downgraded the quality of the research paper. The novelty of content knowledge is the core of a paper and reviewers focus more on the value of the content than the language, the feasibility, originality and novelty in particular, which are the real defects of doctoral students. This paper also found that the supervisor plays an important role in students'academic writing and publication. What's more, the differences in academic writing needs between social science and natural science students, male and female students were found.This paper recommends that the design of academic writing curriculum should be based on students'needs and the characteristics of different disciplines. A good cooperation between science specialists and language professionals is well proposed. Education institutions should provide various resources, such as professional on-line editorial service, academic writing programs, writing group activities and specialists'consultation, to help doctoral students improve academic writing capacity. |
