A Study On English Majors’ Writing Techniques Application

Writing is an important means of expressing and communicating thoughts with potentialreaders in words. In foreign language teaching and learning, five skills of listening, speaking,reading, writing and translating are usually considered to be the standard of measuring one’sEnglish level, among which writing has been set as an indispensable part in kinds of Englishtests like CET-4, CET-6, TEM-4, TEM-8etc. According to the investigation made by CaiHuiping and Fangyan (2006),47.1%students think it difficult to write, and the number of thestudents who like English Writing Class only takes up one sixth of the whole class. Manystudents hope to improve their writing level in a short time to cope with examinations. To caterto their needs, types of Writing Guide and Model Writings appear on campus, some of whicheven take precedence over the teaching materials in English Writing class. Students wish toimprove their writing abilities by memorizing essay samples instead of studying those basicwriting techniques in book.Students’ attaching too much importance on essay samples rather than writing techniquesleaves some questions to researchers. Are writing techniques significant in improving students’writing level? With the theoretical foundation of writing such as punctuation, diction, effectivesentences, and rhetorical devices, the thesis puts forward three questions:1) what’s theopinions of English majors on writing techniques?2) Is writing score correlated to writingtechniques? How about the correlation between writing techniques themselves?3) If so, whatimplications on English Writing teaching can be achieved from their correlations with eachother?31English majors who are juniors (in the first term of the school year) from TaiyuanInstitute of Technology participate in the present research as subjects. The total scores of thewriting part in Intensive English Examination are collected for study. Those compositions weremarked by two English writing teachers based on Wang Lifei’s method, which is known as“holistic scoring”(Wang Lifei,2002:73-75). Then, from the aspect of applying writingtechniques, another list of scores is given by the same teachers. Apart from that, a questionnaireis designed to get students’ opinions of application of writing techniques. All of the data areanalyzed by the software SPSS.The result shows that English majors consider diction to be the most influential factor ofwriting, and punctuation, the least. Effective sentences and rhetorical devices have the biggestinfluence on the total score of writing, and the former is also correlated with diction and rhetorical devices. Thus, some pedagogical implications can be achieved as the following:1)an English writing class should put teaching and learning of the basic writing techniques on animportant position;2) English writing teachers should know about students’ needs and lacks;3)English writing teachers should also assign different topics to students and give the possiblefeedback as much as they can.