English writing is a headache for China's English majors.However, writing teaching still assumes the weakest role inlanguage teaching. This paper chooses the English majors andtheir writing teachers as the target audience and holds thatwriting instruction should stress the writing process and make ashift from the traditional product approach to the processapproach. According to the survey, we find in mostcompositions, only a few errors of form (e. g. concerninggrammar, spelling, mechanics ) exist, but the texts are vagueand general. Nevertheless, writing teachers commonly adopt theproduct approach, which focuses on the product of writing,emphasizes the grammatical correctness but disregards thestudents' initiative in discovering and exploring the content. How call the teachers develop the English majors' capability ofdiscovering content or ideas? They may apply the processapproach, which employs the communicative theory as itstheoretical foundation, stresses communicative competence, focuses on content and can help students to discover what theywant to say.
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