An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Anchored Instruction On Junior Middle School Students' English Writing

One of the important language skills for English learners is English writing,it is also the concrete embodiment of learners' comprehensive ability.With the rapid development of education today,a higher standard of requirements has been set to the needs of English talents.However,it is difficult to develop and enhance the writing skills of junior middle school students,which sets a higher request for English writing teaching in middle schools.Therefore,it is quite necessary and urgent for middle school English teachers to explore more effective teaching methods for English writing.On the basis of Constructivism and Situated Cognition,Anchored Instruction emphasizes relatively real situation in the teaching of English writing.Through the establishment of situation,identification of problems,autonomous learning,cooperative learning and effective assessment,Anchored Instruction explores the "anchor" step by step,and gradually improves students' ability in the process of the construction of knowledge.The application of Anchored Instruction to English writing teaching in junior middle schools enables students to participate more actively in the process of English writing,and develop more fondness for English writing.In Skehan's(2003)opinion,language complexity,accuracy and fluency are the most effective tools for measuring language ability.This study attempts to apply Anchored Instruction to junior middle school English writing class in order to explore the effects of Anchored Instruction on junior middle school students' English writing.Limited by the English level of the subjects,this study doesn't consider complexity.Based on Constructivism Theory and Situated Cognition theory,this study explores the effects of Anchored Instruction on junior middle school students' English writing,and mainly answers the following two questions:(1)What are the effects of Anchored Instruction on English writing fluency of junior middle school students?(2)What are the effects of Anchored Instruction on English writing accuracy of junior middle school students?The research subjects of this study are 60 students from two parallel classes in Grade 9 of Panqiao Middle School in Lengshuijiang District,including 30 students from the experimental class and 30 students from the control class.The teaching experiment lasts for 12 weeks.The experimental class adopted Anchored Instruction,while the traditional Product Approach was applied to the control class.During the experiment,pre-test,instant post-test and delayed post-test were carried out for the experimental class and control class respectively.After the experiment,instant post-test was carried out immediately and delayed post-test was carried out in the fourth week after the experiment.SPSS 21.0 data analysis software was used for statistical analysis of all data.The major findings of this study are as follows:(1)After the experiment,the results in immediate test show that the writing accuracy of students in both experimental class and control class has been improved compared with the results before the experiment,but the experimental class has a larger improvement.This indicates that although Product Approach has immediate effects on improving students' writing accuracy,Anchored Instruction has more obvious effects.The results in delayed test show that the writing accuracy of students in the experimental class and the control class has been improved four weeks after experiment compared with that before the experiment,while the experimental class has a larger improvement.And compared with the results at the end of the experiment,the writing accuracy of students in the experimental class has been improved,while the writing accuracy of students in the control class has decreased.This indicates that Anchored Instruction is more effective in improving students' writing accuracy than Product Approach in delayed effects.(2)After the experiment,the results in immediate test show that the writing fluency of students in the experimental class was significantly improved compared with before the experiment,while the writing fluency of students in the control class didn't have any changes.The results in delayed test show that the writing fluency of students in the experimental class remained high,while that of students in the control class was similar to the results before the experiment.This indicates that Anchored Instruction has both immediate and delayed effects on improving students' writing fluency,and the effects are much better than that of Product Approach.The experimental results show that Anchored Instruction has both immediate and delayed effects in improving students' writing accuracy and fluency.Anchored Instruction is effective and feasible to the improvement of the accuracy and fluency of junior middle school students' writing.Due to the limitations of objective factors and the author's own research level and ability,this study has still some shortcomings,such as insufficient research duration and insufficient research samples,which need to be further improved in the future research.This study can provide possible guidance for English writing teaching in junior middle schools.