An Investigation of Chinese Undergraduate English Majors’ Graduation Theses from 2007 to 2009

Abstract

Data about 459 graduation theses from 2007 to 2009, by undergraduate English majors at a teachers college in Sichuan, were analyzed in SPSS 13.0. The major findings are as follows. Nearly half of the research topics were found to be about English teaching and English acquisition. Studies on literary works center on only a few well-known writers and their representative works. The higher the title of a thesis supervisor’s is, the higher score he or she gives to a graduation thesis. Cultural studies are least likely to obtain high scores. Measuring not only students’ research and writing skills but also their oral and presentation skills, scores given by an oral defense committee weakly correlate with the scores given by either a supervisor or a reviewer.