An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Literature-reading And College Students' English Writing Competence

Research and investigation in L2 field indicate that writing competence of college non-English majors is at a relatively low level. The fact has roused great concern from many language researchers and language teachers who focus on how to improve learners' writing competence. Based on a large number of empirical studies and theoretical researches, researchers have drawn the conclusion that in both L1 and L2 learning process, the interaction between reading and writing together work on the development of the whole process of language learning, that reading serves as models of good writing, and even more important, serves as sources of information and ideas that stimulate thinking, discussion, and responses, all of which are essential foundations of writing. In short, reading has an important role to play in writing classroom. However, the situation at present in college English classroom is far from satisfactory. Because of various restrictions, the relationship between reading and writing is not attached deserved importance to and literature readings, though as models of language, is not properly used in college English class. Consequently, the present study aims to explore the old question from a new perspective, i.e., to improve students' writing competence by applying literature-reading activities into college English class. The research questions involved in the present study include:1) Why literature is employed to improve learner's writing competence;2) How to choose appropriate literature works and how to organize effective reading activities in class in order to improve learner's writing competence;3) Whether literature-reading has an equal effect on learner's grammatical competence, discourse competence, and sociolinguistic competence and why.Research methods employed in the present study include literature reviewing, questionnaire, experiment, and interviewing. The experiment lasts for one term. Subjects in the experiment are 90 sophomores from two natural classes in Northwest Normal University. In the experiment, literature-reading activities are employed in the English class of the experiment class, while the teaching method used in the control class does not change. The results of the experiment indicate that as literature effectively stimulates learners' interest in reading and learners take an active part in class discussions and writing activities, their vocabulary is enlarged and grammar awareness is promoted, which leads to their significant improvement in grammatical competence. In addition, when students are exposed to not only sufficient but interesting language input, they are eager to take an active part in language output activities, which naturally improves their cognitive ability and their control on text and organization, so an improved discourse competence is possible. However, as sociolinguistic competence involves long-term learning of complicated target culture, it could not be greatly improved within a short period of time and it demands both language learners' and teachers' efforts over a long period of time. Generally speaking, well-designed literature-reading activities in college English class have positive effects on the development of learner's writing competence.The paper consists of six parts. The first part mainly introduces the research background, research questions, origin of the research, significance of the research, and research methods. In the second part, based on the review of the previous relevant studies, necessity of the present research is stated. The third part is the theoretical background of the study which includes the hypotheses and theories of reading-writing relationship in both L1 and L2 research field, and the advantages and possibility of reading literature in college English class. The fourth part presents the design of experiments in the study, including aims, hypotheses, subjects, material, process and results. In the fifth part, reasons lying behind the experiment results are explored. In the last part, conclusions and limitations of the study are summarized briefly.