The challenge of academic writing for Chinese students within ...

interaction of individual writer and his/her reader while the social constructionist
approach perceives writing as a product of a discourse community (Nystrand,
1990). ‗The varying and ever-changing nature of the elements of writing‘
according to Silva and Matsuda (2002, p.253) complicates a writer‘s task since
the writer is not only creating texts by simply presenting their view of reality,
but constructing the texts through negotiation of their own view of the elements
of writing with the views of a particular discourse community.
In the context of L2 writing, international students write in a different rhetorical
situation and discourse community from the one they are accustomed to. They
might find it challenging to construct texts which reflect or align with views of
the specific discourse community and its readers because there might be a lack
of compatibility between conventional self-representation in the particular
situation and the writer‘s self-construction (Silva & Matsuda, 2002). Since the
1990s, research on L2 writing has started to investigate the context of writing
and the writing experiences of international students in particular academic
settings (e.g. Casanave, 1995; Connor & Mayberry, 1995; Johns, 1991; Leki,
1995; Prior, 1995; Riazi, 1998; Spack, 1997). The empirical studies indicate that
contexts of writing play an important role in disciplinary writing tasks and
writing demands differ considerably across disciplines. International students
writing in a L2 context acquire not only academic literacy skills but also
knowledge of disciplinary conventions (Angelova & Riazantseva, 1999; Riazi,
1998). Spack (1997)‘s longitudinal investigation of the reading and writing
strategies of an undergraduate Japanese student at a U.S. university revealed that
the student was more frustrated by the lack of discipline-specific discourse
knowledge and conventions than proficiency in English. Different disciplines
have different expectations and practices. Even within a discipline different
classes and even the same tutor responding to different students or tasks may
have different expectations (Prior, 1995). Moreover recognizing the value of
global contextual factors of disciplinary community, Casanave (1995)‘s study of
12 first-year international doctoral students‘ writing experiences stresses the
predominance of the immediate, local, personal and interactive factors that touch
students‘ lives directly in their constructing the contexts for writing.
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