Output Theory And The Teaching Of College English Writing

This thesis covers an experimental study concerning the college English writing with the application of Swain's "output theory". Taking into account the poor performance of CET-4, especially in the writing part, as well as some problems lying in the teaching of college English writing, this study was carried out to search for an approach to the improvement of English writing among college students.This study has done much to investigate the major difficulties in students' English composition, their responses to the problems in their writing, and their need for teacher's help in such case. In the experiment conducted in this study, 104 sophomores of Chongqing University have participated as subjects, as an experimental group and a control group. With the "reflection-inquiry" method proposed in this thesis, the experimental group were asked to think their products while and/or after writing, to correct the noticed mistakes as many as possible, and to ask for teacher's help with the unsolvable problems. Through 7 writing assignments during a term, all the questions for the teacher have been kept for further study. What's more, there were a pretest and a posttest for two groups to examine the effectiveness of the new writing approach. At the same time, a pre-questionnaire was employed to find the feasibility of this study, and a post-questionnaire was used in the experimental group to survey the subject's opinions about the "reflection-inquiry" method.At last, this experiment has got a promising achievement, in which we can see significant difference between the experimental group and the control group. Besides, it has been exposed that the major authentic need in writing are around phrase and sentence, etc. It is suggested that recognizing what students really want in the language learning, the teacher assist students with the improvement of English writing more systematically.Based on the output theory, this paper provides us with significant pedagogical implications for the promotion of college English writing.