The Research On Application Of Process Writing In Teaching Senior High School English Writing

In recent years, more and more high school English teachers have realized the important role of writing in English language teaching and learning. Despite the great efforts made by teachers and students, English writing is still the most challenging and threatening task for most students. One major reason for this fact is that our teaching practice still falls back on the traditional product writing approach. Such practice seems to focus on the final products of the students and have ignored cognitive, thinking and communicative factors of the writing process. Actually, this process is complicated, recursive and non-linear.In order to reduce or eliminate students' fear of English writing and improve their English writing ability, the major concern of the present thesis is to explore and apply the process writing approach to teaching English writing in high schools and to verify its effectiveness and feasibility. The research attempts to answer the following questions:1. Is the process approach to teaching English writing helpful in changing students' confidence, motivation and attitudes towards writing?2. Can students' writing ability in content, structure and language be improved through the process approach?The subjects are 102 students from 2 parallel classes in Senior Grade Two in Beijing. During the four-month research, the researcher carried out the process approach to teach writing in the experimental class while the product approach was applied in the control class. Four research instruments were used in the research:two questionnaires related to the subjects' confidence, attitudes and motivation of English writing, interviews, observation, and two compositions written before and after the experiment. By analyzing the collected data, the researcher finds that: After the experiment, the students feel more confident in writing. Their attitudes towards writing change dramatically. Their motivation is apparently stimulated.The students'writing ability in content, language and structure has improved greatly.It is hoped that this thesis will help English teachers in senior high schools gain a better understanding of the process writing and more and more teachers can apply this approach to their own teaching practice.