A Study Of Advanced Chinese Learners' Revision Behaviour When They Composing In The Computer

The purpose of this paper was to compare different writing ability writers' revision behaviour from 67 advanced Chinese writing class students when they wrote narrative,argumentative and practical writing.According to the stage,time,position,units and behaviour when changes were made,we sort revision into 17 categories.According to their scores,16 students who scored higher than average score 3 times were defined as high ability writers,14 students whose scores below average score 3 times were defined as low writing ability writers.Questionnaire,screen capture tool and stimulated recall were used to compare the difference between different writing ability students' revision behaviours.Besides that,this paper also explored the revision behavior of all overseas students when they use computer to compose and the relationship between text type and revision number.We draw several conclusions from our research:1.There are many differences between high and low ability students when they writing:skilled writers prefer Chinese writing to less-skilled students,they not only value the effect of revision,but also plan and monitor more before and during writing,their writing mode tend to be recursive way.After finish the draft,they also spent more time on reviewing and did more modifications.2.when students made changes to their texts,they tend to pause for some time and revised at the sentence they just typed.Delete is the mainly way they revise and they usually made changes at lower level.3.Comparing different writing task,students made most number of revision in narrative,and made least in practical writing.It is worth noting that students show a greater individual difference in revision,the more modifications do not mean the higher the quality of the text.Based on the research data and conclusions,this paper put forward some suggestions for Chinese writing class:1.Screen capture can be used as a tool to know students' writing difficulties and promote students'writing ability.2.Teachers should urge students to develop good writing habits through detailed plan and revision to prove texts' quality.3.Developing Chinese thinking ability also very important for students.4.How to judge and improve the compositions can be taught in our Chinese writing class.