A Study On The Effects Of Process-oriented Approach In The College English Teaching Of Writing

The importance of writing has been widely accepted. But nowadays, college English teaching of writing is quite ineffective. In many English tests, especially in CET-4, writing remains to be the item that students find most difficult. On one hand, though most students want eagerly to improve their writing proficiency, they are confronted with the frustration of not knowing how to write and what to write due to their limited language competence. On the other hand, teachers also make complaint of the heavy workload of correcting students' writing papers, which conversely, prevents them from making any change of the present low-efficiency phenomenon.The low-efficiency in the college teaching of college English writing renders us to examine again the traditional teaching approach we are now applying. The traditional teaching approaches are based on the structural-view of the language and they emphasize the input of the grammar knowledge. Too much emphasis on grammar knowledge in writing will inevitably result in the students' negligence of the content of writing, which, in the communicative view, should be the centre. Even though the communicative teaching approaches have gained increasing attention, linguists and language experts confine their research to the communicative function of listening and speaking while that of writing is still being neglected.Based on the above view, this paper puts forward that the process-oriented approach should be strongly recommended. That is, to resolve the students' problem of not knowing how to write and what to write by putting more emphasis on theirwriting process and giving them more effective guidance. To illustrate the importance of the new approach, I set up a hypothesis that the process-oriented approach can achieve more in improving the students' writing proficiency.To testify the hypothesis, this paper undertakes an experiment carried out in two classes of random samples- the 63 students in the environmental chemistry class as the controlled group (CG) and the 61 students in the computer class as the experiment group (EG). Because all the participants of the experiments were about to take part in the to-be-held CET4 test and also because they were not informed before-hand that they were to be involved in a language experiment, all the students were enthusiastic and hence were very "cooperative" during the whole process of the experiment and all the score data are valid enough to enter the final analysis.The following tools are used in the experiment: (1) a pretest held to prove the assumption that the students of both groups have had the basic linguistic skill to construct an English prose and that they are on the same writing proficiency level; (2) the experiment, in which the students in the experiment group compose a writing task of about 120 words by employing the process-writing approach while the students in the controlled group accomplish their writing still by using the traditional writing approach; (3) a posttest held to further prove the efficiency of the process-oriented approach and to ensure that the students in the EG group are capable of implementing the process approach even without the teacher's guidance; (4) a questionnaire distributed to the students in the EG group to find out their attitudes to the new process-oriented approach.In the experiment, the independent variable is the process-oriented approach while the dependent variables are the scores gained from the three tests. In order to avoid probing into the issues of validity and reliability, this paper selects threepublished CET-4 writing topics as the testing topics of the experiment.Through detailed analysis of the collected data, a safe conclusion can be arrived at that the new process-oriented approach does function more effectively in improving the students writing proficiency.As to some of the controversies concerning the new process approach, this paper also presents some pedagogic suggestions, hoping that it can help to perfect the approach and make it more applicable. Unavoidably there exi...