Research On The Effect In Different Stages Of Length Approach

Although listening, speaking, reading and writing are believed to be four basic skills of English leaning, writing is always treated as the weakest part of English learning. How to improve the students’ writing ability becomes the key problem that attracts many scholars’and English teachers’ interest, and these scholars and teachers try to do many kinds of researches to improve teaching methods.Based on "Output Hypothesis" proposed by Swain, Professor Wang Churning put forward the Length Approach, which is write-to-learn method, in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in2000. In the Length Approach, the researcher forced the students to write long compositions to stimulate the students to practice the students’knowledge, and adopted the new evaluation method, that is giving more praise instead of criticism, to develop their interest and confidence. Therefore, the students can improve their English ability and develop their initiative through the practice, and the study achieved the good effect among the English majors in Guangdong University of Foreign studies.In order to improve the English teaching and understand the effect on the English writing ability and English learning ability among non-English majors through writing long compositions, the author made the experiment in the two classes93non-English majors at Jiujiang University to search for a more suitable and effective teaching method. The study lasted for one semester, one class from Accounting was experimental group, and the Length Approach is used in the EG, at the same time, the other from Business was control group, and the traditional writing teaching was adopted in this class. The results of the study would come from the analysis and comparison. In the experiment, the students were required to write one composition every two weeks, answer two questionnaires and complete two interviews. And it is proved that the Length Approach can be effective in English learning, it can not only develop the students’output ability, but also arise their interest and confidence. Further more, the author also surveyed the effects of the Length Approach in different steps of the study, and try to study the Length Approach in details.There are five parts in this paper. The first part is an introduction. It introduces some background information and the problems about English learning and studies, and it also lists the significance of the study. The second part is Literature Review, which discusses the theoretical basis of the Length Approach and gives some brief introduction to the Length Approach. Then the previous studies on the Length Approach are listed. Part three is about the research methodology. Details about the study, data collection are listed in this part. The forth part is the results and discussion. In this part, the writer indicates the results with the experiment, and discusses these results. The last part is the conclusion of this paper, and it includes main findings, implications of the study and the limitations of the study.