An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Production-oriented Approach On Practical English Writing Of Senior High School Students

Language ability is an important dimension of the core competence of English,and writing ability is a major aspect of English language competence.Previous studies have shown that the cohesion and coherence of English discourse are the important factors that affect the quality of students’writing.However,there are some problems existing in most senior high school students’English writing such as the misuse of cohesive words,the confusion of sentence structure and the incoherence of discourse.Therefore,exploring how to improve cohesion and coherence of students’ English writing through effective teaching methods has become an important research issue.Production-oriented Approach(POA)proposed by Professor Wen Qiufang is a teaching method with Chinese characteristics to effectively improve students’ English ability.However,the researches on POA in English writing teaching mainly focus on the teaching procedure of POA and its impact on English writing,and the experimental researches on writing cohesion and coherence are limited.Under such a background,this thesis combines POA with the teaching of English writing in senior high school to study the following two questions:one is the impact of POA on the cohesion of senior high school students’practical English writing and the other is the impact of POA on the coherence of senior high school students’practical English writing.This research is an experimental study.The subjects are 97 students from two parallel classes of a senior high school in Shijiazhuang city,Hebei province.POA is applied to the experimental class and Process Writing Approach is applied to the control class.A 12-week comparative teaching experiment is conducted.The writing cohesion of experimental class and control class is analyzed according to Halliday and Hasan’s classification of discourse cohesion.The writing coherence of experimental class and control class is analyzed by Coh-metrix 3.0.And then SPSS 26.0 is used to conduct independent-sample T-test and paired-sample T-test.After the experiment,nine students in the experimental class are selected for interviews.The following conclusions are drawn:in terms of writing cohesion,POA can effectively improve the discourse cohesion of students’writing.Students’awareness of using cohesive devices has been improved.They try to use effective cohesive devices to strengthen the logical connection of the discourse.In terms of writing coherence,POA can effectively improve the discourse coherence of students’writing,including partial coherence and overall coherence.Students can use more explicit words and some cohesive devices to increase the semantic overlap between the sentences and the paragraphs to make their writing more coherent.This study proves that POA has a positive impact on promoting the cohesion and coherence of senior high school students’ practical English writing.It provides some reference for the application of POA in English writing teaching.