摘要
This paper describes a course designed to help Chinese undergraduate English-majors acquire competence in English research article (RA) writing. Such competence comprises three components: 1) discourse structure of an RA; 2) scientific thinking and reasoning; and 3) academic language. Participants were from one intact class of 28 senior English majors at a university in Shanghai. This course was experimental and designed to develop a scheme for teaching RA writing to the senior students in China. Students' RA writings throughout the semester were collected as the main data. Findings show that discourse knowledge, scientific thinking, and linguistic structure can be learned and transferred using these mediating tools: 1) the exemplars of sample RAs; 2) teacher's demonstration and feedback through mini-training sessions; and 3) analysis of genre and norms of RAs. The process-centered, theme-oriented and inquiry-based pedagogy adopted in the course may shed some light on English RA writing teaching practices to Chinese EFL learners.
本文描述了一门旨在帮助中国英语专业本科生提高英语学术论文写作能力的课程。英语学术论文写作能力包括三个组成部分:1)学术论文的语篇结构;2)科学思维;3)学术语言。来自上海某大学一个大四英语专业班的28名学生于2009-2010年第一学期参加了实验。该课程是由一名教授原创设计并执教的一门实验性课程,目的是通过系统指导学生学习学术专题、训练学生的学术研究能力来发展他们的学术英语写作能力。通过分析学生们的一个学期的学术写作的作业,发现在中介工具的作用下,语篇知识、科学思维和语言结构可以在课堂教学中学习到,并迁移到新的学术写作任务中。这三个中介工具是:1)学术论文范文;2)教师的演示、反馈和课堂专题训练;3)学术论文的文体和规范。该课程采用的过程为中心、主题导向的探究型教学方法对中国英语学术论文课堂教学有着积极的启示意义。