Research Of College Students English Writing Teaching From The Perspective Of Cognitive Categorization

English writing teaching, being an essential part of English teaching, has been proved to be more and more important in improving students’ English level. Writing is an active capacity in recorded form, and it is the comprehensive embodiment of students’English level and all factors of knowledge. Cultivating students’ writing capacity is an important task in English teaching.Some problems have been found frequently in the attitude of college students towards writing. And the fact is that in English teaching, writing has been put in a secondary place. And college students haven’t realized the importance of learning English writing. From the perspective of motivation, they are not interested in English writing. And from the perspective of aims, most students are just forced to practice writing. And there are also problems in the teaching methodologies of the teachers. Traditional teaching methodology considers teachers as the center of writing teaching. In this way, Teachers’responsibility is only to comment on the articles and point out mistakes in grammar and spelling. Students’ ability to make comments on the articles themselves has been totally ignored. And negative comments on the articles students composed reduce the creativities of students. So it is important that the attention should be focused on the ratio between Teacher Talk Time and Student Talk Time. Teacher Talk Time is helpful for students to learn knowledge of languages, while Student Talk Time helps to consolidate languages. And the weakness in language foundation is also an important obstacle, which stays in the way of improving students’English writing. In the course of composing, students just forget the exact word they need. Under the help of an English dictionary, students translate the Chinese sentence formed in their mind to an English one. In their articles, sentences that do not fit into English grammar can be found everywhere. Mistakes in grammar are very common things in college students’ writing; even mistakes in spelling can be found. The kinds of problems are caused by their weakness in English foundation.To solve the problems found in students’writing, some improvements should be done in English writing teaching. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, categorization is the basic ability for people to think, feel, behave and speak. And knowledge about the capacity of categorization is important content of human way of thinking and human language. The member that shares more generalities with the other members, who belong to the same category, is the typical member or central member, which is also referred to as prototype. Category is established by using the prototype as the reference point for cognition. Gestalt is a term in Gestalt psychology, which reveals that when people begin to know something, they first try to know it as a whole rather than as different elements. Gestalt perception has some certain laws in assembling information, which are referred to as Gestalt principles of perception organization. Prototype is the member of the category, which has the best ratio, that is to say the best member of the category. So prototype has its own Gestalt, which is often established by the whole. But in the making process of the prototype Gestalt, all the parts play an important role. According to Gestalt psychology, the whole is greater than the sum of all the parts. So the meaning of a sentence or a discourse as a whole is greater than the sum of meaning of the words, phrases and sentences that make up the sentences and discourses. Teaching methodologies based on theories can help students to form an English way of thinking.So in the actual English writing teaching, teachers can apply the following strategies to improve students’English writing. The first one is to pay enough attention on teaching of lexis. Words are the members at the basic level when referring English as a categorization. And it is natural for students to learn the basic level members first in order to comprehend the whole. The second one is to enlarge the amount of language input in teaching. And the third one is to form a good habit for students to learn English writing from English discourses, which just fits into relevant laws of Gestalt perception.