A Study On The Integration Of Teacher-sponsored Freewriting Into English Writing Teaching

The role of English in international communication is becoming increasinglyprominent. To improve the comprehensive English abilities of the whole nation,especially that of the contemporary college students of various levels, has become oneof the effective ways to comply with the international trend and to enhance thenational competitiveness. Among the basic skills of English language, writing ranksthe highest level. It’s also considered as one of the most important standards to judgestudents’ comprehensive English ability. Currently, however, English majors’ writingstatus quo is generally far from being satisfactory. Their writing ability lags behind therequirements of The English Teaching Syllabus for English Majors. Therefore, it’snecessary to find an effective English writing teaching method by combing both theadvanced teaching theory in foreign countries and the present situation of Englishwriting teaching in China. Since the term of freewriting has been advocated by PeterElbow in1975, many scholars from abroad have done studies on it and its application,which proves that freewriting can improve students’ writing ability. But the problem isthat most of the foreign researches are taken to see the improvement of Englishwriting ability when English is considered as the first language, very few studies areconducted to see the improvement brought by using freewriting in an English as aforeign language classroom. In China, especially, the studies mainly focus on thesimple discussion on the importance of freewriting. The teachers and researchersmostly focus on the self-sponsored freewriting and consider it as a part of after-classexercise and few of them practice it in class. Therefore, the teacher-sponsoredfreewriting is scarcely ever involved in class teaching and usually discussed from thetheoretical perspective. This paper is inspired by the relevant studies onteacher-sponsored freewriting and intends to combine it with the present Englishwriting teaching and learning situation in China, thus to explore whether the Englishwriting ability of English majors can be improved by integrating teacher-sponsoredfreewriting into English writing teaching.This thesis is supported by empirical study. To implement the study, the author chooses60sophomores majoring in English from two natural classes to participate inthe one-term experiment. The author randomly chooses one class as experimentalgroup with29students taught by integrating teacher-sponsored freewriting in theirclass and the other one as control group composed of31students instructed bytraditional approach. The employed instruments for the experiment include: pre-test,post-test, pre-questionnaire, post-questionnaire, interview and students’ writings. Allstudents’ pieces of writing are marked by the TEM4standard. All the collected dataare processed with the help of “SPSS19.0”. The research findings are as follows:Firstly, the data comparison between the two groups of pre-test and post-testobviously indicates that the writing ability of the two groups of students has beenimproved to a great degree but with quite different rate.Secondly, the results from the questionnaires and the interview display that theinterest in English writing of the experimental group students has been increased a lotcompared with that of the control group students. The experimental group students aremore active in their English writing.Thirdly, the students’ writings show that the teacher-sponsored freewriting hashelped the students improve their writing fluency, better language flexibility, maketheir theme more profound, increase the number of words written and quicken thewriting speed within limited period of time.In summary, this study shows that integrating teacher-sponsored freewriting intoEnglish writing teaching gains English majors’ positive attitude and effectivelyimproves their writing abilities.