Research On College English Writing Teaching Based On Need Analysis

Writing,as a basic English skill,has become a hot topic in English teaching research in recent years,thus,its importance is well-known.In China,teachers mainly adopt the traditional writing teaching mode of "from top to bottom",while students can not decide the teaching content and teaching methods.Teachers may not fully understand what the students need and want to learn,which results in a growing gap between the effectiveness of students' learning and teachers' teaching expectations.Understanding the needs of students is an important way to improve students' learning effect,while conducting need analysis is an effective way to understand the students' needs.Need Analysis is the first and necessary step in designing and implementing college English writing course,and it is an indispensable step in curriculum design as well.In order to improve the teaching effect and the present situation of college English writing,it is quite important to carry out the research of college English writing based on need analysis.Both quantitative research and qualitative research methods were used.A questionnaire survey was conducted on the writing needs and writing status of 319 students from 13 classes of college English writing courses in a university,and 312 valid questionnaires were recovered.All the statistical data were analyzed with SPSS19.0.In order to know more about students' writing needs and writing status,10 students were randomly selected from 312 students to conduct interviews on writing needs and writing status.The results show that there is a gap between needs and the present situation of college English writing.1)Students are not fond of English writing;2)Students do not know the criteria for evaluating a composition;3)Teachers do not meet students' strong needs of learning vocabulary,phrases,sentence patterns and expressions;4)Teachers do not meet the needs of students who wish to learn to think in English and the way to develop paragraphs;5)Teachers do not meet the needs of students who want to have effective resources and have a good writing environment;6)Students wish to combine teacher's evaluation with self-evaluation and peer evaluation,while in fact,self-evaluation and peer evaluation were ignored.In order to meet the writing needs of college students and change the present situation of college English writing,the author puts forward the following methods to improve the writing teaching: 1)To improve students' interest and enthusiasm in writing,2)To train students how to evaluate a composition,3)To guide students to increase the input of chunks,4)To train students to establish a thought framework of writing,5)To set up a writing learning platform based on campus network,6)To help students set up writing groups.