Raising process-genre awareness in Chinese Tertiary EFL con-text: Introducing the Purdue Online Writing Lab

Writing is always regarded as a purposeful way of communicating to an imaginary other.It is necessary to adhere to the author’s purpose and make sure that it is effective,instead of pro-viding only meaningless chunks of sentences to discourage readers.However,it’s worth no-ticing that the‘invisible reader’has(a)purpose(s)too.Writing is a process of the author try-ing to negotiate with the readers by following certain genrespecific restrictions.This focus has been well captured by an online writing workshop-the Purdue Online Writing Lab,which manifests a novel perspective to view writing as a process constrained within a specific genre.With the advancement of computers and internet,the Computer Aided Language Teaching method(CALL),as presented in this article,can foreground prominence of writing principles and motivate students to learn and write creatively.Suggested use of the workshop as such is provided at the end of this paper.