An Empirical Teaching Study Of College English Writing Based On The Output Theory

According to the writing requirement set by the College English syllabus, the current status and effects of College English writing are barely satisfactory. In order to solve the problem, the study attempted to employ the output hypothesis theory into the practice by a teaching experiment, which was designed under the three different functions of the output hypothesis theory--the noticing/triggering function, hypothesis-testing function and metalinguistic function, applying task-based approach to operate this experiment and trying to provide the reformation of College English writing with more directions.The basic procedure of this experiment can be described as follows:first of all, the four natural classes from both the Material and Chemistry School and the Computer School of Xi'an Technological University were chosen as the subjects, two of which were regarded as the experimental class of 80 students; the other two, as the controlled one of 80. Fortunately, the author of this thesis has been teaching these students College English. And the experiment lasted from September to December,2010. The methods this study employed involved classroom teaching, the accumulating of teaching materials, the questionnaires, the pre-test and post-test and so forth. According to the analysis and synthesis of the experimental with SPSS 17.0, the results indicated that 80% of the students were not interested in English and English writing at all, and 85% thought that English writing was the most difficult part of English learning and they had not any confidence in it. All this contributed to the necessity of this experiment. And after the 4-month training with the new teaching approaches in the experimental class, the interests and the confidence of the students were promoted greatly. The results obtained from the pre-test and post-test showed that before the experiment, the experimental class and controlled one performed relatively the same proficiency in English writing with the scores of 6.62 and 6.50 (the full score,15), while after the experiment, the comparative scores were 7.75 and 6.83 respectively.In general, under the guidance of the output hypothesis theory proposed by Swain, this teaching experiment in English writing is feasible and effective, so it is worth advocating and enhancing. However, some problems are inevitable during the process of the reform, such as the design of the tasks, the materials chosen for lectures and so on. And these problems remain to be solved in the further researches.