A Discussion Of Teaching Methodology Of English Writing

Teaching English writing is always the most difficult part of English education in China. How to improve English writing teaching has become one of the heated topics of today. Based on the previous studies, this study attempts to investigate the effectivenessof the new teaching model------improving the students' writing abilities and arousingtheir interests in writing by employing qualitative and quantitative statistical approaches.Despite the intense studies concerning English writing teaching in recent years, the conditions are not so satisfactory in China: The Chinese students' writings are generally lacking in content or a clear core meaning, with boring, simple sentence structure. Owing to massive Chinglish, those writing are often not understandable and readable. Apart from the above-mentioned weaknesses, the students, who mostly come from the countryside, in the college where I work, have some other additional weaknesses: ① The students are terrified by the sight of the assigned topic, having no train of thought. ② Their writings lack of good vocabulary and full of inappropriate words without any purposes. ③ Improper cohesion, poor coherence as well as loose structure are the main problems. ④What they are doing is "translating" Chinese into English (Chinglish). ⑤The students lack of interests in composing.In order to change the situation, this thesis has designed an empirical experiment: employing the new teaching model in the classroom. Two alternative hypotheses are derived as follows:①The new teaching model is conducive to improving the students' writing and arousing their interests of composing. The new teaching model has a delayed effect. The experimental group students perform significantly better than the control group students do in exams.②Compared to the traditional approach, the new teaching model has no effect on improving the students writing abilities and arousing their interests in composing. The new teaching model has not a delayed effect. There is not significant difference in scores between the experimental group students and the control group students in exams (null hypotheses).The subjects in the present study are two classes (81 students) of English majorsfrom QinZhou College (formerly QinZhou Teachers' College), chosen randomly from Grade two. Class one is experimental group (consists of 41 students;M: 5;F: 36);class two (consists of 40 students M: 5;F: 35) is control group. They were enrolled in QinZhou College in 2004, aging from 19 to 21. In each class, most of the students are (about 79%) from the country or counties in QinZhou area, a few of them are (about 21%) are from medium-sized or small cities. The subjects are from the same grade, almost all of them had received 7-8 years' formal English instruction in middle schools. Their English are on the same level. Most of them hold positive attitudes toward writing. In pre-test, the result of t-test shows that there is not significant difference between them.The independent variable of this experiment is a new teaching model—the integration of the Process Approach and the Length Approach. The dependent variable is the improvement of students' writing abilities and the arousing of students' writing interests. The control variables are the students' ages, sexes, background, and the English level before the experiment. As for the measurements, the experiment has conducted the followings: 1) Questionnaires: (before the experiment) to see the interests and motivations of the students in writing;(after the experiment) to see the effectiveness of the new teaching model on arousing the students' interests in writing as well as their attitudes toward writing. 2) Pre-test, to make sure that the subjects are on the same level;3) Conducting the experiment: employing the new teaching model in the EG;employing the traditional teaching model in the CG. 4) Post-test, to prove the effectiveness of the new teaching model;5) Delayed test, to prove the long-term effectiveness of the new teaching model. The topics of the three tests are different in style, content. The time for tests is 50 minutes. 6) The writing parts of CET-4 in June, 2005 and December, 2005, to prove the effectiveness of the new teaching model in the exams from another perspective.The statistical tool------Excel, is adopted to analyze the scores of the students, andthe samples are compared to get more conformation of the effectiveness of the new teaching model. Finally, the present writer has the following findings:1) Largely speaking, the results are those the present writer expected, in the hypotheses, namely, in the post-test, and delayed test, the EG's mean score is higher than that of the CG The superiority of the EG students is also shown in the sampling analysis. Thus, the null hypothesis has been rejected.2) The results taken from the Questionnaires (Questions raised before and after theexperiment ) have also proved the effectiveness of the Length Approach in arousing the students' interests in composing, brimming over the writing with enthusiasm and strengthening their confidence in writing, even learning English as well.3) Not all the students like peer-evaluation. As the results of the analysis of the questionnaires, we teachers should state clearly and make students understand the strength of it.Lastly, on the basis of the experiment (not eliminating the unavoidable factors which affect the validity), the present writer puts forward tentatively some suggestions on teaching English writing, and is hoping that it would be helpful to the English teachers.