A Study On The Effectiveness Of "length Approach" Based Teaching Of Writing

For the students in China, they have no natural environments for listening and speaking, but they have enough chances of reading and writing. Based on this reality, Professor Wang Chuming from Guangdong Foreign Studies University proposes the English teaching concept of"write to learn", which is called Length Approach later. It is widely accepted by English educators as soon as it is issued. However, there are few researches on its effectiveness to develop vocational students'writing performance.The results of a questionnaire on vocational students'writing learning show that the students in vocational colleges have the psychological obstacles as well as linguistic obstacles. The Length Approach can not fully meet the vocational students'input requirement. Based on the concept of"Length Approach"and the reality of the vocational students, the present author advocates to integrate Length Approach with the intensive reading textbook, the internet, extensive reading after class, peers feedback and portfolio to develop their writing ability.In order to testify the effectiveness of the Length Approach based method, two writing exams (pretest and posttest) are carried out, the scores and the writing samples are analyzed on the aspects of fluency, complexity and formality. 12 students from the experimental group are interviewed.The results suggested that the Length Approach based method can make vocational students become more confident in writing long compositions due to the outside class writing environment, much autonomy and little pressure; It can highly motivate students to produce much written output because of high percentage of the total score that length accounts for and interesting topics designed. Length Approach based method can overcome the students'psychological and linguistic obstacles and play a positive role in their writing performance.