An Experimental Research On The Anchored Instruction Model In Teaching English Writing

English writing, one of the four basic important skills for College English, is always a tough task to deal with. For example, a variety of mistakes can continually be found in students’ writing. This fact resulted in little improvement to student’s writing proficiency and their gradual loss of interest in writing. Meanwhile, there still exists a great many problems in teaching English writing. Based on the above situations, the following issues that how to stimulate students’interest, how to improve their writing ability and how to update current teaching approach have become a very valuable question to be studied. Though with lots of useful study results previously, this thesis aims to offer new ideas and help teachers find more efficient model by introducing the anchored instruction model in teaching English writing and undertaking an experimental analysis.Anchored instruction is one of the four typical instruction models based on the constructivism theory. This model has been proved to be very effective in teaching and it has often been used in the teaching of math、social science、and other language culture courses. In china, the application of it has mainly been to elementary language arts and math lessons. But few researchers have ever applied anchored instruction to the teaching of college English composition. The author here intends to explore the effects of anchored instruction model to the teaching of college English composition. And the following questions will be discussed in depth:1) What attitudes do the learners have on anchored instruction model?2) What attitudes do the learners have on the product approach?3) To what extent can anchored instruction model stimulate students’interest effectively?4) In which aspects does anchored instruction model improve students’ writing proficiency?The methodologies in this thesis mainly contain comparative experiment and questionnaire survey. The experiment is conducted in two classes from Hunan University of Arts and Science, one is Class1of materials chemistry2012as the experimental class and the other is class1of Information Computation2012as the control class respectively. The experiment lasts for one semester. In the experimental class the anchored instruction model was applied and in the control class the product method was employed. The procedures of the experiment are as follows:First the researcher did the pre-test to prove the student’s writing ability of two classes is in parallel and obtained more general information of students’English writing though the first questionnaire. Then, at the end of the experiment, the researcher analyzed the post-test scores of two classes and second post questionnaire only for the experimental class to get the information on the students’ attitude toward anchored instruction and whether their interest has been increased in the experiment. The test papers used before and after the experiment as pre-test and post-test are Set paper for CET-4. The data from the pre-test and post-test were processed by software Spss.ll. Independent Samples Test and Paired Sample Test were used. Research results demonstrate that anchored instruction can effectively improve the learner’s writing in the aspects of "content","wording", and "organization". However, the product approach is superior to anchored instruction in "Grammar", and "coherence". Most of the students hold positive attitudes to the anchored instruction; the learner’s interest in English writing is motivated and their confidence in English writing is enhanced to a large extent.Nevertheless, in order to take the best advantage of the anchored instruction model, the English teacher should update their teaching philosophy and adopt approaches flexibly. Teachers and students should reflect timely for the improvement to the learning and teaching of English composition.