A Study On Teaching English Narrative Writing Through Reading-to-Write In High School

As one of the English language skills,writing is an important way of language output for English learners.Their writing level is believed to largely reflect their English language competence.Hence,along with the intensification of English teaching research,writing teaching has received more and more academic attention,and various teaching methods have been proposed.The reading-to-write approach,one of the proposed methods,holds that reading and writing are correlated tightly,and much reading can improve students’ writing proficiency.The approach has been researched extensively at home and abroad.However,most of the literature is the theoretical or empirical research on the effects of the approach;a little focuses on its teaching design for English writing teaching in senior high schools.Even less involves the narrative writing teaching design through reading-to-write in senior high schools.Therefore,based on the input hypothesis,output hypothesis,schema theory,and the dynamic assessment theory,this research tries to answer the following questions by using an interview,a pre-test,a post-test and a questionnaire: 1.What is the current situation of English narrative writing teaching in high school? 2.What is the feasible teaching design of English narrative writing through reading-to-write? 3.What is the effect of the teaching design on students’ English narrative writing?Through the teacher interview,the research found that the product-oriented approach is still the mostly-used narrative writing teaching method;although the reading-to-write approach has been applied,there are still some problems in its teaching design;students have difficulties with vocabulary,language use,and organization in narrative writing.And the analysis of the pre-test confirmed the students’ difficulties.Accordingly,the research put forward four pieces of advice on narrative writing teaching through reading-to-write.First,teachers should have a clear understanding of the reading-writing relationship to decide what is taught in reading teaching.Second,when teaching reading,they should pay more attention to discourse teaching.Third,they should fully utilize for more language input the passages in reading comprehensionexercises as supplements to the passages in textbooks.Last,when teaching writing,they should advocate dynamic assessment and encourage self-revising and peer-revising in class.In line with the advice,the research first constructed a flow chart of teaching design and then generated the teaching design plan for classroom teaching.With the teaching design,it conducted a 12-week teaching experiment in two parallel grade one classes of a Jinan high school.After the experiment,by comparing students’ scores of pre-test and post-test,the research found that students’ narrative writing competence has been promoted significantly,especially their vocabulary,language use,and organization.In addition,as the results of student questionnaires showed,although students believed the teaching design proposed in this research indeed improved their narrative writing competence,they thought it was imperfect and gave some suggestions.They suggested that teachers should provide more reading materials,more linguistic knowledge practice and more kinds of writing task forms.The research still has many shortcomings due to the limitation of time and subjects.