On Cultivation Of Text Awareness In High School English Writing

Text, which is used for a certain purpose and function of communication, is a language unit or communicative event, including the following properties: meaningful, informative, logical and cohesive. Virtually, English writing is a key means by which a writer is able to communicate with others. It is actually a course during which the writer encodes certain language to create a certain text according to the English thought pattern. It is certain that one can not create a real English text without a sharp text awareness so as not to fulfill his supposed purpose of communication effectively and successfully. A great many scholars both home and abroad have developed many kinds of writing methods such as Product Approach, Process Approach and Genre-based Approach, which have been proved to be incomplete and unable to improve students' writing ability in the writing teaching practice. The reason is that they ignore writing is essentially a course of creating a certain English text and thus, it must follow the nature and characteristics of a text.At present, writing isn't paid much attention to in English writing practices at Senior High School. English teachers are still focusing the instruction of writing on grammar and sentence-writing level rather than the cultivation of English text awareness. As a result, it is no wonder that students' writing is always far below the required level of a real English text, and fails to meet the writing demands. How we could improve students' writing ability is a key issue needed to be resolved immediately by us English teachers. Based on the theory of English text awareness and some research achievements gained from home and abroad, a theory hypothesis is put forward here: the mode based on the cultivation of English text awareness is a good way to improve students' writing ability in Senior High School, with the hope to solve the present problems in the writing teaching practice, i.e., how a teacher can organize his teaching scientifically and a student can manage to write a real passage according to the requirements of the writing task in NMET.In this paper, the writer employed the following different kinds of research methods: literature review method, questionnaire method and experiment research method. Firstly, the writer theoretically proved that the mode based on the cultivation of English text awareness was an effective way to help students form the English thought pattern and thus succeed in writing a real English passage through the literature review method. Then, the writer performed a questionnaire survey in September 2006, aiming to find out the existing problems in the writing teaching practice in Senior High School, where the subjects were from Senior 2, Hubei Jingmen Foreign Language School. The results of it showed that all the students had found it difficult to achieve a high score in writing in the test. Besides, neither the teachers nor the students hadn't considered English writing consciously from the perspective of an English text.To prove the theoretical hypothesis, the writer adopted the most important means, a 3-month research experiment, involving the students from Class (8) and (10) in Senior 2, Hubei Jingmen Foreign Language School. Prior to the experiment, the students writing scores were recorded. For class (8), the writer employed the new method to instruct them how to write; while class (10) still used the traditional method to write. Then the writer kept a record of their writing scores immediately after the experiment. Also, the writer analyzed the data by relating their writing scores to cohesion and coherence of text, paragraph development of text and style of text, which indicated that the students from the experiment class had a much higher average score than the normal class due to their great use of text techniques; while class (10) exposed many problems in the course of writing and made much slower progress than class (8).From the above analysis, the paper then comes to a conclusion: the mode based on the cultivation of English text awareness can effectively improve students' writing ability and has obvious advantages over the traditional writing teaching method.