The Application Of Length Approach In The Teaching Of High School Students’ English Writing

English writing is always a problem confusing both the students and the teachers in senior high school.The traditional English writing teaching to some extent can’t arouse students’interest,nor can it provide a good guidance for students’ writing.The growing importance of writing pushes English teachers to think about how to improve students’ writing proficiency efficiently.Therefore,the researcher tries to apply the Length Approach to the teaching of English writing in Senior One,hoping to provide students with good writing ideas,help students develop good writing habits,so as to improve their writing proficiency.The study explores the following research questions:1.How does the Length Approach affect students’English writing proficiency?2.How does the Length Approach affect students’ interest and confidence in English writing?3.What are the different effects of Length Approach on students with different English writing proficiency levels?The research includes three major parts:teaching experiment,writing test and questionnaire/interview.The subjects were students from two natural classes in a senior high school in Lianyungang City.One class was the experimental class and the other was the control class.Basing the writing design on the Oxford textbooks,the researcher assigned eight long writing tasks to the experimental class and conducted an 18-week experimental teaching.After the experiment,the students were tested on their writing proficiency.Data analysis results combined with interviews were used to find out the changes and differences in writing among students with different writing proficiency levels.Questionnaires were used to find out whether students’ confidence and interest in writing had been enhanced.The study finds that,first of all,the Length Approach practice has a positive impact on students’ writing proficiency.The specific results are as follows:(1)more and more students can write long compositions;(2)composition structure is better organized;(3)the content of students’ compositions is more meaningful and relevant to the theme;(4)students’ language expression is more advanced and diverseSecondly,students are no longer afraid of English writing,on the contrary,they are more interested and confident in writing.Students with high level of writing are more confident in expressing their ideas and organizing their compositions.They show great interest in the further improvement of these two aspects.Students with medium level of writing are more confident in word-choosing and sentence-making.Students with low level of writing are more confident in meeting the basic requirements of word number and content in writing.Finally,regardless of their writing proficiency,students benefit from the Length Approach practice to varying degrees.Students with high writing level have made remarkable progress in paragraph development and composition structure.Although mid-achievers also have made some progress in composition content and composition structure,their progress is mainly reflected in the increasingly rich vocabulary and complex sentence patterns.The main change of the low-achievers is that they overcome their fear of English writing,and think that the length design based on textbooks is conducive to improving their writing levelThe application of Length Approach in teaching of English writing in senior high school has brought some pedagogical implications.In terms of using teaching materials,teachers should overcome the drawbacks of "teaching materials",adopt the concept of "using materials to teach"and learn to use teaching materials creatively;in terms of the output of students,teachers should not only pay attention to input,but also realize that input and output are equally important;in terms of teaching evaluation,teachers should combine summative evaluation with formative evaluation.The diversity and rationality of evaluation methods should be emphasized and more positive evaluation should be given to students.This study hopes to provide some references for future research on English writing teaching in senior high schools.However,because of the short implementation time,there are some limitations and shortcomings in the experiment,such as how to better stimulate the participation enthusiasm of students who exclude writing,how to more skillfully combine writing tasks with textbooks and design more writing training forms,and so on.