An Experimental Study On The Cognitive Approach In Improving Senior High School Students’ English Writing

English writing is one of the big problems in senior high school English teaching, and is also one of the major projects in many researchers’studying lists. To find out an effective and scientific teaching approach is the educators’ common goal, but no teaching approach could suit all classes.On its psychology basis, the Cognitive Approach believes that every normal human being has, somewhere in his brain, a set of grammar rules with which he can use to create an infinite number of sentences. Therefore, the high school students are also believed to have the ability of learning English grammar and new writing methods.Carried by the complex sentences training, the research focuses on two hypotheses that the Cognitive Approach could help to raise the senior high school students’English writing interest and that the Cognitive Approach could help to improve the high school students’ English writing ability.The author of the thesis did the research for a whole semester in Senior One in a regular senior high school, using questionnaires and tests and interviews as research instruments. Firstly500students were surveyed about their attitudes towards the English writing, only to find that they were most not interested or confident in English writing. Then132students from two equal-level classes, Class533as the control class and Class534as the experimental class, attended the complex sentence training experiment. Meanwhile, three tests (pre-test, mid-test and post-test) were given before, in the middle and after the experiment. All data collected from the tests were analyzed by SPSS21.0and the results illustrated that the experiment made the increase of the complex sentences in the compositions and the increases of the writing scores while no increases in the English examination scores.After the experiment, the author interviewed the subjects with the help of their teachers, and the records illustrated that the experiment made it easy for the subjects to learn and use the English grammar rules and that the experiment strengthened the subjects’awareness of multiplying the sentences into the English writing. They felt English writing no longer that terrible but much more interesting.