A Study On The Application Of Combining Both Product Approach And Process Approach To Writing Instruction In Vocational Context

Writing has been universally recognized as an important part of language learning. Although the traditional product approach to writing teaching is still commonly used and helpful to some extent in vocational institutes, where students are less proficient in language learning compared with university students, it has been critiqued that the product approach focused more on students'final products instead of the writing process itself. In order to find a better way to teach vocational students'writing, in this thesis the author puts forward an alternative approach, that is to combine the product approach and the process approach reasonably.The purpose of the thesis is to find which approach is more efficient in helping students with the improvement of writing proficiency. And it is hypothesized that:⑴both the combined approach and the traditional approach to writing instruction contribute to the gains of writing proficiency for Chinese vocational students; and⑵in the distinctive context, the combined approach is more effective than the product approach to writing instruction for vocational students.72 students from Chongqing Technology and Business Institute participated in the experiment. They were divided into two groups, for which different approaches were respectively provided. Both groups were required to take the pretest before the experiment to decide on the writing proficiency, and then they were given the posttest at the end of the experiment to decide on the improvements in writing performance. The scores from both the tests were collected and analyzed statistically by the author to get findings, which prove that the combined approach is more effective in assisting vocational students in improving their writing ability, although both the product method and the combined one lead to improvements after a semester.Meanwhile, to know about students'attitudes toward the writing approach applied in the experiment, subjects from the experimental group were involved in an interview. From subjects'answers to the interview questions, the findings can be concluded that most students in the experimental group think the product- and the process combining approach is very helpful in their writing learning and would like to be continually under the guidance of it.In addition, implications on further studies on writing are given in this thesis.