A Correlative Study Of College Students’Chinese Writing Proficiency And English Writing Proficiency

Writing, as a written expression of ideas, play a vital part in daily life. It variesin forms and persons. Therefore, increasing writing proficiency becomes the focus ofteaching purposes. For English teachers, to increase students’ writing proficiency doesnot merely require the basically linguistic knowledge, the cultural backgrounds butalso the awareness of differences in approaches to rhetorical modes as well as thepositive and negative transfer of the first language proficiency. According to theCommon Underlying Proficiency Hypothesis, proposed by Cummins, and some otherviews concerning with the language transfer, the current study is aiming at exploringthe correlation between Chinese writing proficiency and English writing proficiency.87senior students in Shenyang Normal University are selected as the subjects.The participants are given the6topics and writing requirements, which includesChinese description, Chinese exposition, as well as Chinese argumentation andEnglish description, English exposition as well as English argumentation, with eachweek each topic. Due to the overlap of description and narration, these two rhetoricalmodes, in this research, are classified into one category, with its comparison toexposition and argumentation. The composition is marked by two different teachersand calculated the average score. The quantitative analysis is acquired by the SPSSsoftware package.The study testifies the hypothesis that there is marked correlation betweenChinese writing proficiency and English writing proficiency, there is weak correlation between Chinese writing proficiency and English writing proficiency in descriptionand narration, there is no correlation between Chinese writing proficiency and Englishwriting proficiency in exposition and there is marked correlation between Chinesewriting proficiency and English writing proficiency in argumentation.