Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background
Writing is a very important language output skill, which is usually considered as ameans to measure students' English comprehensive level as well as an important skill of oneof the general requirements of the college English syllabus. According to the requirements,non-English majors should write a short composition with complete content，clear centralidea, appropriate words and coherent discourse of no less than 120 words within 30 minutes.Students are expected to be capable of mastering the basic writing strategies.However, even if most of the college students have studied English for several years,from primary school to university, they can not write fluently with appropriate words. Thereis no escaping fact that, according to the statistics, students' writing competence is relativelyweak，especially for those in the independent college. They tend to write short sentenceswith poor vocabulary in loose and disordered structure.Reasons for this current situation are various. A major factor is likely that both teachersand students attach less importance to writing. What's more, in the teaching process ofcollege English, there is no writing class for non-English majors. The college Englishteachers just teach writing in the intensive reading course. So, due to the inadequate classtime, the teachers are often overwhelmed by the task of giving corrections and evaluations.In other word, teachers do not have enough time to correct students' compositions and theycan't provide the feedback for students in time. In addition, it is worth noting that nearly85% of the students surveyed in the questionnaire of this study say that they are not satisfiedwith their writing proficiency, among which 22.2% are not content with it at all. The majormotivating factor for students to leam English writing is the need to get high score in thefinal examination of English. For this reason, students are not interested in English writingand they are not satisfied with their writing performance.
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1.2 Significance of the Research
The writing performance of non-English majors being far from satisfactory stands outas a serious problem, so, how to arouse their interests, and search for a significantly effectiveway to improve their writing proficiency have become a crucial issue. Improving students，英语论文网站，writing performance is a challenge, not just for the future achievements of the collegeEnglish teaching, but for helping students communicate with others in the authentic world.The project-based learning ( PBL for short) focuses on the central concepts andprinciples of a particular subject, and intends to involve students in the meaningful task.Through the accomplishment of a “driving” special writing project in the real life, studentswill leam actively and construct the knowledge independently, for the sake of the highestgoal of realizing students’ capacity of generating knowledge. Based on this teachingapproach，英语论文，this thesis explores the application of the PBL in teaching college English writingso as to testify whether the PBL could better the effect of teaching college English writing.With analysis of the features and the process of the PBL, the author tries to seek out aneffective way to arouse the enthusiasm of the students' writing and improve their writingproficiency. Meanwhile, this thesis will also offer a
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