Improving Students' English Writing Performance In Independent College By Integrating Writing With Reading

The development of writing competence is an important and difficult item in the English teaching process, because writing is a synthetic and complicated process of language utilization. Traditional product-based approach has long been predominant in English writing methodology. With the higher demanding of English learner's writing ability, however, its weak points are becoming more apparent: The students do not have ability to write a complete and appropriate English paragraph after having learned English for such a long time. English writing is a hard nut in English teaching, so how to improve the students' English writing competence appears to be an important link in English language teaching practice in colleges and universities.The present thesis, whose theoretical bases were Krashen's comprehensible Input Hypothesis and Swain's comprehensible Output Hypothesis, put forward the writing approach of integrating writing and reading combining the present situation of Independent College English writing. In order to verify the effect of this approach, the author carried out the experiment study to compare the effectiveness of writing-reading approach and traditional approach on the improving English writing performance. It was hypothesized that 1) both writing-reading approach and traditional approach to writing instruction contribute to the gains of writing performance for Chinese EFL college English students; and 2) writing-reading approach is more effective than traditional approach to college students. 63 college EFL students who are all freshmen (in the second term at the college) from two different majors in an independent college named College of Applied science, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology participated in the study as subjects. They were required to take a pretest and three posttests. At the same time, two questionnaires were designed and distributed before and after the experiment. The results showed that the writing-reading instruction achieved higher rate of gains in writing proficiency than traditional writing instruction.By the effect of teaching practice, it turns out that applying writing-reading...