A Comparative Study Between Product Approach & Process Approach In The Context Of College English Writing

English, one of the widely used languages and vital means of communications all over the world, has become the vital approach for people from different nations to exchange information, ideas and thoughts as well as share emotions. The significance of English teaching is increasingly important, of which the improvement of English writing abilities are of extreme importance for vast number of college students and English users.The writing abilities development has been indispensable part in both English teaching and learning. As English writing plays a vital role in developing the comprehensive abilities of students in language application, the paper, based on the analysis of the existing problems in teaching practice and confronted by students, aims to explore solutions to them and suggest relevant countermeasures from the perspective of teaching of English writing. Thus the paper is expected to promote reforms in this field so that students' overall abilities in practicing English can be substantially improved. Therefore, it is extremely significant for teachers to ponder what to teach and how to teach in teaching practice.In recent years interaction-focused capacities development has been the main objective in college English teaching. As a result students' abilities to conduct oral communication have been tremendously improved; comparatively the significance of developing their written English has been underestimated to some extent even to the point of being ignored. So in view of practice this paper is based on the current situations of writing teaching for non-English undergraduate majors in privately-funded universities. According to surveys and researches, this paper aims to get to the root of the existing problems to analyze the causes and seek specific solutions to and approaches to solve the problems in teaching practice. Such perspective and practice is very essential.This thesis is theoretically guided by teaching pedagogy of English writing and focuses on the comparison of two writing methods—product approach and process approach by means of different research-related methods including experiments, questionnaires, analysis and group discussions. Professionally this paper employs Wilcoxon Order-testing as non-parameter statistical method. The research target involved is students (they are to graduate in 2011) majored in preschool education of Business School of Yunnan Normal University. Combined them with my actual teaching, this thesis tries to probe into problems existing in the teaching of college English writing and explore solutions to them. To be specific, this thesis intends to make a comparison between the students applied with the two writing methods including product approach and process approach and then compare the same students divided into high grade group and low grade one to discover which of the two is more feasible and effective in helping non-English majors to improve their writing as far as non-native Chinese learners in English learning context are concerned.The whole paper is composed of preface, theoretical discussions, experiments, research results and discussion in addition to conclusions. The summary of the main contents are as follows: Chapter 1—the preface, is mainly discussing the background information, research objectives and significance of the project. Chapter 2—theoretical discussions, is discussing on the theoretical grounds of result-oriented and process-focused teaching, together with the distinctions between foreign languages study and second language acquisition in the context of China. Chapter 3—experiments, mainly probes in to the design of experiments including research approaches, tools, problems to be discussed, research target and processes. Chapter 4 deals with the discussions on research results, aiming to test the experimental results, analyze and discuss the experimental data apart from the analysis of and discussions on after-research questionnaires and group discussions. Chapter 5, which discusses the conclusions and their constraints plus significance of the research to teaching, is the conclusion mainly about the inspirations got from the teaching practice and relevant suggestions,Therefore, the research reaches the following conclusions:1) Both methods contribute to students' improved writing effectively and efficiently.2) As far as the students with low-grade are concerned, product approach is comparatively more constructive to enhance their writing scores. 3) As far as the students with high-grade are concerned, process approach writing iscomparatively more instrumental to enhance their writing scores.To be frank, while conducting the research, the write also adopts qualitative methods to explore the changes in students' psychological states, study motivation and interest as well as their attitude to English writing. According to the research, the students with low grades are found to be more involved in terms of eagerness in receiving the training and meeting the deadlines of writing assignments than those with high grade. Comparatively speaking the former tends to take the writing course more seriously owing to their poor basis and is more anxious to improve their writing grades. So after a term of constant efforts, some students ranked in the low-grade group manage to outrun those in high-grade group. On the contrary, the performance of the latter is declining. Therefore, the individual efforts made by students are also rather essential. However we can not afford to neglect the phenomena, that is, students in both groups unanimously prefer the teacher-graded writing tasks to those graded among them thinking such between-students-graded way is not instructive enough for only minor mistakes are uncovered. Moreover students are doubtful and skeptical of what their partners have marked.