The Focus And Development Of College English Writing Teaching Research In China

How to efficiently improve students' English writing competence is widely regarded as one of the most difficult tasks in English teaching in China.With the increasing quantities of researches on college English writing teaching,it is essential and beneficial to probe into and analyze the development process of this field in time,for its findings help reveal the development and trend of the relevant research,predict the future research and its orientation.The present study has collected and analyzed 137 papers published on core journals and CSSCI included in CAJD and intends to answer the following three questions: First,what are the main research fields within college English Writing Teaching Research in China from 2001 to 2015? Second,how do these research fields relate to each other? Third,what are the development trends of college English writing teaching research in China? By analyzing the key words extracted from 137 papers on Bi-comb 2.0 and conducting cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling(MDS)of 20 high-frequency key words on SPSS18.0,the findings from the study revealed: 1)There are four main research fields.Field I is about the researches on teaching methods and factors affecting writing;field II is about the researches on formative assessment;field III is about the researches on writing tools and feedback;and field IV is about the researches on writing environment.2)Field I closely relates to other research fields,but its internal structure is loose.Field II connects well with other research fields and its internal structure is close,accordingly stable research structure and research scale have been formed.Field III has neither close relationship to other fields,nor stable internal connection.Field IV has close internal relationship,but it does not closely relate to other research fields.3)In the future studies,the research subjects will be enriched;innovation on writing teaching methods and application conditions will continue;the researches on textbooks will increase;the cooperation between or among different research organizations will increase.The present study has outlined the focus and development of college English writing teaching research in China in the last fifteen years,revealed the directions in the future studies,enriched the application scale of co-word analysis and provided researchers with suggestions for future researches.