The Application Of The Process Approach To English Writing Teaching In High School

Writing serves as a process of communication. It is the most difficult of the four basic linguistic skills. For China's high school students, English writing is a headache. However, English writing teaching still assumes the weakest role in high school English language teaching. This paper chooses English writing teaching as the target and holds that writing instruction should stress the writing process and make a shift from the traditional product approach to the process approach.According to the survey, we find students are over-anxious when confronting a writing task, while teachers stick to the traditional product approach which weighs a final product in terms of spelling, grammar, techniques; etc, with the content of the writing paid no attention to. Under such an approach; students' writing usually reads dull, although some may be formally profound. How can the teachers develop the students' capability of discovering content or ideas? They should make a shift from the form student writers write to what they write and how they write. That is to say, the teachers may apply the process approach, which employs the communicative theory as its theoretical foundation, stresses communicative competence, focuses on content and can help students to dicover what they want to say as they write through several drafts.This paper is divided into six parts. The first part is the brief introduction, which puts forward the main idea of this paper; the second part reviews the six approach to teaching writing in ESL classes, and points out that there is a focus shift from the product to the process; the third part generalizes the current situation of writing instruction to English teaching in China and problems that students have; the fourth part suggests applying process approach to replace the product approach and introducing the theoretical basis of process approach ,some characteristics and the teaching model of process approach; the fifth part is the experiment, with focus on the research hypothesis, research design, subjects and procedure, later on statistical analysis is made with data collected in the experiment and the results fully prove the hypothesis; and the last part serves as a conclusion, in which some advantages of the approach are specified, in the meantime, limitations of the approach are pointed out, and the adoption of the process approach to the teaching of writing is recommended.