A Study Of The Generating Processes In English Writing By Chinese Learners:Proficiency And Writing Medium

In the field of research on writing processes, most previous studies focused on the description of the overall processes and few were conducted to explore one specific process. Differences between more proficient students and less proficient students in these processes were also rarely studied. Then with the increasing use of modern technologies in Chinese EFL teaching classes, keyboard writing has posed great challenges for the traditional paper-and-pencil writing. Compared with the systematic and fruitful studies of the latter, the study on keyboard writing was not stressed enough. To overcome those limitations, the current study aims at finding out the generating features of Chinese EFL students by taking English proficiency level and writing media into consideration.Participants of the study were20students from two colleges in Shandong Province. Data sources included think-aloud protocols, semi-structured interviews, and students’ written texts. All the collected data were transcribed, with the qualitative data treated with Excel, and the quantitative data with SPSS19.0for further analysis.The findings of the study indicated that most participants spent over50%of time in generating, and Chinese was widely used in this process. Differences were found between more proficient students and less proficient students in their generating time, generating focus, and pausing behaviors. As for the writing media, while significant differences were found among the more proficient students in both writing media, the same result was not found within the less proficient group.This study concludes that generating dominates the writing processes of Chinese EFL learners, regardless of their language proficiency level. Most of the participants focus on language content, and pause a lot within sentences. Yet language proficiency and writing media plays an important role in deciding students’generating time. More proficient students tend to spend more time in generating than the other group, and paper-and-pencil writing is considered to be more time consuming.The study would help college teachers better understand the overall and the specific features of generating at different language proficiency levels level. By taking those features into consideration, the teachers are expected to make some changes on their teaching methods, and provide more customized instructions for a certain group. Meanwhile, findings on the role of writing media in generating processes serve as good pedagogical references to fill the teachers’knowledge gap in keyboard writing. This is of great significance in modern times since more and more writing tasks are conducted on the computers.