1.1 The Present Situation of Chinese College Students’ English Writing
Writing in English, as one of the four essential skills, is a relativelycomprehensive test for college students because it not only tests college students’ level ofgrammar and vocabulary, but also tests their abilities of organizing, analyzing, expressing,and reasoning. Compared with high school students’ English writing level, many collegestudents’ English writing level has gained a great improvement. Their compositions may beof more enriched content and involve more writing strategies. Meanwhile, a good manyproblems are also exposed in English writing.New college English curriculum requirements for non-English major students requirethat they should be able to complete writing tasks for general purposes, for example,describing personal experiences, impressions, feelings or some events, and to undertakepractical writing. They should be able to write within 30 minutes a short composition of noless than 120 words on a general topic, or an outline. The composition should be basicallycomplete in content, clear in main idea, appropriate in diction and coherent in discourse.Students are expected to be able to have a good command of basic writing strategies. Theserequirements are basically in consistent with the requirements of College English Test BandFour.However, many college students’ writing level can’t reach the desired level and theystill have some difficulties in English writing, which may be caused by the lack of vocabularyand writing techniques, influence from the mother tongue, weakness in basic languageknowledge, lack of writing motivation and other problems. Besides, for non-English majorstudents, there is no writing class for them to practice their writing skills. Many collegestudents prefer to follow certain exam-oriented writing templates which limit their thinkingand make their writing abilities difficult to improve. Therefore, our college students’ Englishwriting still needs improving to reach the desired level.
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1.2 The Significance and Purpose of the thesis
CET4 is a popular exam which aims at testing students’ comprehensive Englishabilities. Many schools have listed CET4 grade as an important measuring standard forstudent’s English level which may influence their successful graduation and more andmoreemployers require that their employees should have a CET4 certificate. For sophomores,one of the important and difficult tests they will face is CET4. In this exam, English writingplays a vital part, which accounts for a large percentage of the total score. The writing scoreis 106.5 and takes up 15% of the total score. So a student’s grade in CET4 is greatly affectedby his or her writing score. However, many students reflected that they felt very difficult inwriting a good composition and their writing scores in CET4 were very low andunsatisfactory. Though they wanted to change this situation, they felt at a loss about how todeal with it. So it is very necessary for teachers to help students improve their wring abilities.Scaffolding instruction based on the Constructivism and Vygotsky’s Zone of theProximal Development is a relatively advanced teaching method. In recent years, studies onthis teaching method become very popular among scholars and teachers. However, the studieson how to apply scaffolding instruc，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文
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