An Overview of EFL Writing Research in Taiwan

Abstract

Ever since Chen (陳玉美, 1998) conducted a survey on 14 years of EFL writing research in Taiwan, little retrospection of its development has been systematically conducted in this country. In this paper, the literature of three recent years (2005 to 2007) as published in four local journals and proceedings of three major English teaching conferences was examined with the aim to identify the major thrust of the articles, and to point out needed areas for future research. The surveyed studies were classified into four main categories based on their focus: text-oriented, writer-oriented, reader-oriented, and instruction-oriented. They were further classified from the perspectives of problem areas, population examined and research methods used. Last, the results were compared with two surveys conducted in North America. Unlike what Chen (1998) observed, the teaching of writing has become more autonomous, and demonstrates a good array of innovative instructional interventions. Influenced by corpus linguistics and English for specific purposes, an increasing number of papers have concentrated on text analyses of reference corpora or comparisons of reference vs. learner corpora. Future directions point to the exploration of reader-oriented research, writing context research such as workplace English, and teacher education. More rigorous research designs and more effectively written data interpretations that are aligned with efforts in the international community are needed.