The Experimental Research Of Length Approach To Writing Teaching

College English writing has long been the weakest aspect of English learning. Although there is great improvement in students' English level, English writing ability for many university students is still stagnant. They are afraid of writing and short of interests in writing. This brings about great attention to many researchers. Length approach designed by Professor 王初明(1999), enlightens college English teaching. Its principle is to perfect the original script and let students freely write without limitation of the words. It is to encourage students to write frequently and let students realize their shortcoming in writing and improve their writing ability. Wang's experiment shows that English majors made progress in English writing by writing long compositions. The writer of this paper has attempted to adopt length approach to English writing teaching with non- English non-English major students in Xianning College.A hundred and twenty-six non-English majors from Xianning College were selected for the research. They filled two questionnaires: the first was devised by Daly and M. D. Miller (1984) called the Daly-Miller Writing-Apprehension Scale contained 25 statements and arranged in three angles: self-confidence, anxiety behavior, and attitudes towards English writing. The second one was designed by Wang Churning et.al, which attempted to test the subjects' attitude from different angles towards the length approach. It was administered twice, once at the beginning and the other at the end of the semester (after an interval of 18 weeks) to students in the first semester course. And at the end of the term, the subjects were asked to write several paragraphs discussing the good and bad points of length approach. Results showed that to some extent, length approach eases learners' anxiety, and that it helps to improve the writing proficiency through a free environment with a lot of autonomy. The Length Approach can help students lessen then-anxiety and strengthen their self-confidence, therefore enhancing their motivation and increasing their written output both in quantity and quality. Finally students participated in CET-4 test in December, 2005. The achievement tests of the two groups were compared using a t-test in SPSS. The results indicated that length approach teaching in the experimental class was moderately successful.There are altogether seven chapters in the thesis. The first chapter is the introduction.