Applying Reading-to-write Approach To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School: An Empirical Study

English writing is one of the four basic skills of English learning,and it is an integral part of the entire English teaching process.Reading as an effective means of language input has an immeasurable role in the improvement of writing.However,after observing during the internship,I found that English writing teaching in high school faces many problems.Firstly,students are lack of interest and confidence in English writing.Secondly,due to the pressure of the college entrance examination,most of the English classes focus on grammar and exercise training with very little time in writing.Teachers’ guidance on writing is also limited to leading students to recite essays and grade their compositions.There is very little guidance on writing skills.Based on this situation,this study takes fresh students as the research object,adopts Krashen’s language input hypothesis,Swain’s language output hypothesis and Schema theory as the theoretical basis,and uses empirical research methods to apply reading-to-write teaching approach to high school English teaching.The purpose is to explore whether the teaching method of reading-to-write can improve students’ English writing level.The two questions for this study are as follows:1)What are the effects of reading-to-write approach on students’ writing proficiency?2)What are students’ attitudes to reading-to-write approach?In this study,89 junior high school students in two parallel classes of a general high school in Dongguan are taken as the research object,and a one-semester writing teaching experiment is conducted.These 89 students’ entrance scores in English are very similar.46 students in Class 6 are the control group(CG),and 43 students in Class 7 are the experimental group(EG).The research tool involved 13 writing tasks and a questionnaire survey.Each writing class is a continuous class every Tuesday afternoon.During this period,the experimental group uses the method of reading-to-writing,and the control group uses the conventional writing teaching method of separate reading and writing.The experimental materials are the reading articles of compulsory one and two and the optional extra-curricular reading materials.Before and after the experiment,all subjects are tested for writing.The students’ English composition scores for the first monthly exam are used as the pretest of the experiment,and the students’ composition scores for the final English exam are used as the post-test of the experiment.Both essay tests are reviewed by two identical teachers,and indicators such as overall score,vocabulary,syntax,discourse cohesion,and writing content are selected to collect data.After the experiment,the experimental class completed an attitude questionnaire survey.All the data collected before and after the test are all tested by SPSS software to analyze the changes in the students’ writing level before and after the experiment and the overall attitude of the students.The study found that the teaching method of reading-to-write is conducive to improving students’ English writing ability,especially in the four aspects of vocabulary use,sentence structure,textual cohesion,and writing content.And students accepted and recognized the teaching method after the experiment.From some previous studies,it was also found that reading-to-write is an effective writing teaching method,and different reading methods would affect the input of students’ writing.The enlightenment given by this study is that in high school English writing teaching,teachers can make full use of the knowledge gained from reading to pave the way for writing through the in-depth reading of articles and the deep structure and vocabulary sentence explanation of the reading articles in order to improve the English writing ability.Of course,when applying this method,it is necessary to consider regional and individual differences and teach according to aptitude.Due to the short experimental period and the small number of subjects,this study has some limitations and needs to be further improved and perfected in future teaching practice.