Chinese Graduate Students' Experiences with Writing a Literature Review

Abstract

Based on interview data, this study investigated four Chinese graduate students' experiences with writing a literature review at a medium-sized university in Canada. These students, from four subject areas, held varying perceptions of a literature review, but all saw the writing challenges that they encountered mainly as linguistic problems, especially regarding vocabulary and accuracy at the sentence level. The strategies that they used in the composing process were diverse, with each individual relying on them to varying degrees. Findings from this study suggest that Chinese graduate students need assistance in adjusting to the new academic environment and writing-genre expectations.

Chinese Efl Undergraduates’ Academic Writing: Rhetorical Difficulties and Suggestions

“…This perception is also evident in Bitchener and Basturkmen's (2006) study, where supervisors considered that students experienced a high level of difficulty in meeting the requirements of genres while writing DRS. Additionally, there are several other studies which have indicated that Chinese undergraduates need to be explicitly exposed to the different genres of academic writing (e.g., Qian & Krugly-Smolska, 2008;Wang & Yang, 2012).…”

“…To date, there has been a number of research studies about difficulties encountered by students in AWE (e.g., Belcher & Braine, 1995;Bitchener & Basturkmen, 2006;Casanave & Hubbard, 1992;Cooley & Lewkowicz, 1997;Phakiti & Li, 2011;Qian & Krugly-Smolska, 2008;Tang, 2012;Wang & Li, 2008). The early research in this area of inquiry usually looked at the entire piece of student writing and surveyed on a large scale the student difficulties at all levels of text.…”

“…Generally speaking, the results of this study revealingly captured the necessity to help students understand the rhetorical genres of different parts of a thesis and pointed out the future directions this area of inquiry needed to take. Qian and Krugly-Smolska (2008) approached questions quite similar to those asked by Bitchener and Basturkmen (2006), but the former focused on difficulties with writing a literature review (LR) and did not adopt a mode that grouped supervisors and students as pairs. Only using student interviews, Qian and Krugly-Smolska (2008) collected opinions from four Chinese master's students who were studying in Canada and who had varied previous experience of LR writing.…”

“…Qian and Krugly-Smolska (2008) approached questions quite similar to those asked by Bitchener and Basturkmen (2006), but the former focused on difficulties with writing a literature review (LR) and did not adopt a mode that grouped supervisors and students as pairs. Only using student interviews, Qian and Krugly-Smolska (2008) collected opinions from four Chinese master's students who were studying in Canada and who had varied previous experience of LR writing. Their study yielded findings similar to Bitchener and Basturkmen (2006).…”

Noun Phrase Complexity in EFL Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Study of Postgraduate Academic Writing

“…A common finding of research into the writing experiences, difficulties, and challenges as perceived by student authors indicates that students see their problems and obstacles more at the local lexico-grammatical level, i.e. a lack of skilful manipulation of proper vocabulary and syntax for the expression of ideas and arguments, than at the global, generic-structural level (Bitchener & Basturkmen, 2006;Lee & Tajino, 2008;Qian & Krugly-Smolska, 2008;Yeh, 2010). The present study aims to add to the existing literature of investigations into the grammatical features of advanced EFL academic writing at the postgraduate level.…”