The ability to write well is important today for engineers to communicate their ideas with diverse population in the more and more refined and specified engineering workplace. However, engineers including Chinese engineers faced the challenges to improving on-the-job writing skills. The incompetence of writing skills could impair engineers' abilities to develop and refine their ideas, but hinder their career success and promotion. This descriptive qualitative study investigated the Chinese engineers' perceptions of their writing difficulties and needs in an English- dominated workplace in the United States. Data were collected from a total of 55 semi-structured interviews with 15 participants in duration of 10 months. Analysis of data was done by open coding, focused coding, selective coding, and theoretical sampling and saturation as well as constant comparative method that led to a grounded theory.

The grounded theory consisted of three areas of finding in Chinese engineers writing difficulties at the workplace: writing difficulties that the Chinese engineers have encountered, the reasons why engineers faced such difficulties, and their coping strategies to those difficulties. These three categories formed a bi-directional loop which meant that one can be the other's cause and consequence at the same time. In specific, the demand of good writing skills and engineers themselves being inexperienced writers in both Chinese and English caused engineers' writing difficulties and those difficulties illustrated those engineers as poor writers; meanwhile, engineers' writing difficulties resulted in their using diagrams, figures instead of the written texts to cope with the demands of good writing skills. With the writing demand, Chinese engineers need to have adequate preparation for understanding the linguistic feature of discipline-specific language and the writing genres. As they socialized into the diverse engineers. groups at the workplace, they need to attend to the discourse of the workplace and learn to engage into the technical literacy through writing. The attention also needs to draw on to the similarities between the writing process and the design process when helping engineers to understand the intellectual nature of writing.

These findings provide a snapshot of the writing experience of Chinese engineers in the high-tech corporation in the United States. They suggested that Chinese engineers need linguistic and literacy support in developing on the job writing skills, but such support was largely absent in the workplace. The implications for workplace administrators, peers and also engineering education, along with the future research, are discussed.