The Effects Of Process Approach On English Writing For EFL Non-English Majors

Writing teaching has been a problem for both English teachers and college students in China for a long time, though English writing has become more important in recent years and has been paid more attention. Writing still lags far behind other skills. In CET-4 and CET-6 tests writing is the section where students lost most scores. Students are over-anxious when given a topic to write, while teachers stick to the traditional product approach which weighs the final product in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation, with the content of writing paid no attention to.Under such a product approach, writing is much simplified, and students can't make much progress in writing even though they are required to write many compositions. As for teachers, they are always complaining about students' poor writing. In recent years, the mean scores of the College English Test have been raised to 7 from 5 with the full marks of the writing section to be 15, but it is still under the pass mark by 2 points. Such a serious situation stimulates the consideration for the adopting of a more effective approach to improve students' writing ability.On the basis of the above consideration, this thesis proposes the application of process approach in writing teaching as a substitute for the traditional product approach. By adopting process approach, the focus shifts from product to process of writing—the ways in which text can be developed; from concern as to what has been written and what grade it is worth to how to compose a text and how it can be improved (Johnson and Johnson, 2002:257) It views writing as a recursive process of problem-solving during which a writer is engaged in adequate activities of planning, drafting, and revision, which are overlapping and intertwined. Students are the center of writing; teachers are only facilitator for their writing. It is proved a success in the west. In the 90's of the 20th century, it was introduced in to China, but not adopted in the writing teaching (Han, 2001). So in this thesis a research is conducted to test the effectiveness of the process approach on English writing for Chinese non-English college students.. The present author carries out an experiment of 16 weeks long to teach one class in the process approach and the other in the traditional product approach. A semester later, both the two classes take the final examination in which they are required to compose a piece of writing in 30 minutes. By scoring the writings analytically, collecting and processing the data with SPSS 11.5, the conclusion is drawn that process approach is effective in improving students' writing ability in China.