A Study Of College English Writing Based On Anchored Instruction Model

English writing is a language skill that college students must master, and as a productive skill in written form, it reflects the students’ comprehensive language competence. Writing is a way of expression that a person produces all kinds of thoughts, feelings under the condition of interacting with objective things with the help of language symbols after thinking, questioning and reflecting. Writing process is a process of language output, as well a process of solving problems. Language learning cannot be separated from certain situations or scenes, only in the real language learning situations, will students perceive language completely and meaningfully. The improvement of students’ English writing abilities not only needs to own solid language foundation and favorable cooperation with others in the communicative activities, but also needs to actively construct new knowledge. Constructivism believes that learning is always connected with sociocultural backgrounds, namely “situation”. Learners ought to construct knowledge and gain experience only in the actual tasks of real situations as far as possible to make learners master and apply knowledge. In the whole process of foreign language teaching, the instruction of English writing is a weak link, and how to effectively mobilize the students’ interests in writing and to improve their English writing abilities are attracting the attentions of foreign language researchers.This thesis will lead into a new instruction model——Anchored Instruction Model in order to stimulate students’ English writing motivations and interests and to improve their levels of English writing. The so-called Anchored Instruction Model claims that events ought to occur in a real situation, which is based on Constructivism Theory, therefore it is also known as “Situational Instruction”. Constructivist Learning Theory holds the idea that situation, cooperation, conversation and meaning construction are the four elements of learning environment. Learning is the process that students actively construct knowledge rather than passively accept knowledge. Anchored instruction model is required to establish in a real situation that learners identify the target, put forward the goal to achieve the target through the interaction and communication with others through students’ active learning. Anchored Instruction Model tries to solve problems or to express the theme is defined as “anchor”. The process of identifying the problems or issues is vividly described “to drop the anchor”. Once problems and events are identified, learning contents and processes will be fixed like anchor. Students are able to cognize the “conflict” and intrinsic motivations of stimulating learning in the real situation through demonstrating the process of the occurrence and development of knowledge. At the same time, students use the relevant experiences in the original cognitive structures to assimilate and accommodate the new knowledge and new information, so that writing becomes the effective learning process of thought and expression to achieve the aim of meaning construction.Constructivism learning theory holds the idea that learners’ irrational factors such as emotion, attitude, emotion and volition have a direct influence on cognitive effects. Interest is a cognitive tendency that people can actively explore objective things. Thus, it can inspire people’s emotions and wills and change attitudes to issues. For the learners, interest is the best teacher which can stimulate students’ learning enthusiasm and initiative and improve their learning efficiency. As people often say that inspiration comes from life, in college English writing teaching, teachers should create real situations as many as possible related to writings, especially based on tasks and problems solution. In the meanwhile, teachers as well ought to offer students a lot of real writing materials to make student’s thinking become more open. In this way, students’ interest, desire and passion in writing can be flourished. In addition, students express their true feelings with better imagination and creativity in the process of writing, so they can learn to write in an easy environment relatively, ultimately their writing abilities will be improved.This research proposes to adopt combination of questionnaire survey and contrasting experiment to discuss the correlation between anchored instruction model and college English writing scores and the influences on college English writing ability. This research mainly has two questions:1. What is correlation between Anchored Instruction Model and college students’ English writing scores?2. What advantages does Anchored Instruction Model have in terms of improving college English writing ability compared with the traditional teaching model?The study lasted a semester, that is, from September 2015 to January 2016. The experiment is carried non-English major sophomores in two classes of Changchun University of Science and Technology, experimental class and comparative class are selected randomly. Experimental procedure is as follows: before the experiment, students of two classes are arranged to take a writing test under the same condition which mainly examines their existing writing levels. Later, two classes are conducted to take part in a questionnaire survey of which purpose is to have a basic understanding of the students’ writing habits, attitudes, motivations and their views towards the present teaching models. And then teaching experiment is conducted that the experimental group is conducted under the anchored instruction while the control group is adopted by the traditional one. After the experiment, two classes need to take post-test. After then, another questionnaire is only carried out in experimental class probing the influence on students’ writing brought by anchored instruction model and as well what the student’s acceptance and recognition towards anchored instruction model.Software SPSS V16.0 is used to analyze the data of students’ writing performance of pre-test and post-test. After comparing to the differences of writing performances in experimental group and control group in post-test, the result shows that scores of experimental group are better than that of in comparative group. Therefore, the result shows a positive correlation between anchored instruction model and college students’ writing scores. Anchored instruction model is superior to the traditional model through the questionnaire data analysis, which establishes good learning atmosphere for students and help them to build up positive attitude of English writing. In the meanwhile, students have developed good habits of English writing. Furthermore, their confidence in English writing is enhanced. Teachers should change their teaching concepts and transform their role in class teaching to make this teaching model exert its maximum effect, in addition, students also need to learn to autonomous learning and cooperative learning and try to reduce their dependence on teachers. Moreover, Teachers need to create more writing situations which can stimulate students’ learning interest. Then, teachers should also attach importance to the cooperative learning in groups. Next, also the evaluation of learning effect should be timely and comprehensive. Of course, in accordance with this model, teaching materials research also need to be developed.