| Writing is an essential part of language competence and it can help students learn language effectively and reflect students'integrated language level. In recent years, more and more college teachers and high school teachers have realized the important role of writing in English language teaching. According to National English Curriculum for Senior high schools and new marking criteria of NMET, the trend has been reinforced. But in fact after learning how to write in English for five or six years in primary schools and junior schools, students are still poor in writing. Statistics show that the average score of writing in Entrance Examinations to Senior High School in the author's district is only 13.1 in 2004, 12.2 in 2005, 11.5 in 2006(in total,20 points)(data from Teaching and Researching Department). That is to say, students get only half of all points on average, which makes both teachers and students sad. What led to English writing still the most challenging and threatening course for most students? As is known to all, in our country, the results students gain in the examinations are treated as final evaluation criteria in summative evaluation methods, so this has resulted in the fact that many students learn English just for passing examinations or going to school. At the same time, classroom instructions center on examination contents. It is a popular phenomenon for many teachers to lay stress on grammar and exercises. As a result, many students do very well in grammar and get high scores in objective tests, but their ability to writing in English is poor, so many students are gradually losing their interest and confidence in English writing, and some even avoid English writing tasks on purpose. Major problems and difficulties are observed as follows:Firstly, students tend to have low motivation and negative attitudes towards writing. Teachers often hear students complain that they find it difficult to compose in English, they have nothing to write about, or they don't know how to express their ideas in English.Secondly, they are too many errors in language use in students'compositions. The most serious problem lies in vocabulary. Many words consisting of six or more letters are often misspelled. And there are many instances of misusing words and expressions. Students can perform satisfactorily in answering multiple-choice questions; however, when they are required to produce sentences themselves, they make a great number of errors as well as they often use the form of native language to produce sentences. Many sentences sound like pidgin English.Thirdly, the content of the compositions is inadequate. From the students'compositions, we can see they often fail to support their points of view with vivid examples or strong arguments. And some passages even lack the main ideas. Consequently, even if some essays seem perfect in terms of grammar and spelling, they are not convincing and interesting.Fourthly, students don't have adequate skills to express their thoughts, and they tend to neglect the communicative elements of writing in real-life situations, devoting excessive attention to the testing situation and the assumed preferences of the test-paper raters.Fortunately, many scholars have realized the problems and they paid much more attention to them. So, process writing is called for. The writing process is recursive and non-linear. While writing, students exhibit a variety of behaviors such as pre-writing, first draft, responding, comments and final draft. The major concern of the present thesis is to explore and apply a new process-oriented approach to teaching writing that may be suitable for Chinese senior high school students and to verify its effectiveness and feasibility. The study attempts to answer the following research questions:1. Compared with the traditional"product approach", what are the advantages of the new method?2. Is it suitable for the students in senior high school English class in our country?In order to answer these questions, it's necessary to do deep researches on the basis of practice. This paper systematically probes into the formation of the process writing method and its essence, main features and the basic operational model as well. Based on the survey and the experiment, this paper proves the practical value of the Process Writing Approach. First, by data analysis the thesis discusses the current situation of English writing and points out the necessity of reforming the traditional writing teaching model and the feasibility of the Process Writing Approach in theory. Second, the thesis gives a definition of the Product Writing and Process Writing , exploring its formation, essence and main features. Third, the thesis focuses on the experiment on improving senior high school students'English writing by means of the Process Writing Approach. Finally, we suggest the Process Writing Approach should be used flexibly. Here are some aspects of Process Writing:1. The Theoretical BasisAs early as the late 1970s, western linguists pointed out the drawbacks of product writing and advocated process writing. They took writing process as a very complex psychological process of cognitive and linguistic communicative process. Douglas Wallace, a processor of Northwestern University, first explicitly pointed out that writing is a process, in which each step of writing should be taught. (Cited in Judy,1981:16). Two advocates in the United States Raimes and Zamel did a great deal of research in ESL teaching of writing. Zamel stressed that writing should focus on the process writing and creative expressions.(Zamel,1976:74); Raimes also showed that if we only just pay attention to the writing products finished instead of the students'interest in the writing process, then they will not benefit(Raimes,1979: 4). Early in the 1980s to the early in the 1990s, a number of linguists and academics in the United State theoretically and practically demonstrated the significance of process writing. Its representatives are Flower, Hayes(1981: 765-777 ), Grabe and Kaplan(1996: 104-105), Hairston(1988: 76-78), and Keh(1990: 294-306) so on. Today, the process writing has become mainstream teaching of TESL writing in western countries.With the application of the National English curriculum for Senior High Schools reform development in our country, a high premium has been placed on traditional writing teaching, A lot of researches based on the adopting of Process Writing have been done in ELT writing: Zhang Jisheng and Zhou Ping(2002: 19-23), Chen Liping and Li Zhixue(1999: 66-69), Li Seng (2001: 19-23), Li Yan(2003: 44-46), Deng Liming and Liu Hong(2004: 69-72)etc.2. The advantages of Process WritingFirst of all, it provides a positive, encouraging writing environment. The second advantage is that it enables students to be aware of their own writing process. Thirdly, this approach is student-centered. Finally, it increases general cooperative competence.3. The procedures of Process WritingStep 1: Pre-writingThe teacher divides the students into several groups, which has three or four members. Then the teacher gives the topics of the composition that is involved in the text the students have just learned. In this process, the group of students spends five or ten minutes to think individually and come up with raw materials. At the moment, students need to benefit from each other, and they also need to organize their ideas into a clew order in spoken language before they communicate them in written language. After discussing, they now have better composition contents and more appreciate ways to express themselves. Then they discuss their ideas in groups and write down some key words or lexical chunks.The teacher can encourage the students to speak out their ideas in front of the class and develop the publicly. In this way, the students can have a rich resource to draw upon.Step 2: DraftingAs soon as the"raw materials"are presented, The teacher asks students to finish their compositions in 25 minutes. The actual writing process helps students refine their ideas and polish their language. Sometimes they do come out with good points that haven't been mentioned in the discussion. As soon as they start writing, the students don't want to be interrupted by the teacher or peers frequently.Step 3: RevisingThis is the significant step that helps students reshape their writing. Students can correct any mistakes they might have made on such technical aspects as grammar, spelling and punctuation. They can even change some of the ideas in their writing. This can be achieved through self-editing, peer responding and teacher's feedback. Therefore, students need to realize that what they write initially does not necessarily have to be the final product, but that the form and content can be modified and improved as go along.Step 4: Teacher's feedbackIn this stage, the teacher plays an important role in the development of students'writing & learning and takes the following suggestions:1. Don't over-correct the students'mistakes, which would kill the students'interest and shade their confidence in writing.2. Ask or encourage students to correct as many of their mistakes as possible and give the necessary help or suggestions. This is important, because if the students correct their own mistakes with the help of their teachers, classmates, they may gradually learn to be more careful when they write, simply to save themselves the trouble of rewriting afterwards. A kind teacher who corrects the obvious mistakes for his\her students may well spoil them and turn out poor, careless and irresponsible writers, and his\her students may never acquire the ability to edit their own writing.3. In addition to mark the student's composition with a grade, it's best for the teacher to adopt an encouraging tone and to write with a pencil instead of in red ink, for nothing stimulates the student to work harder than letting him\her see his\her progress.Step 5: Final DraftAt the end of the process students produce the final draft and share their final products with their classmates.4. The Experiment StageThe students whose teachers always encourage particular elements of process writing, such as planning and defining purpose and audience, editing and revising, are found to be generally better written than students whose teachers reportedly never encourage these activities. The author integrates the advantages of the process approach and applies it to the writing teaching approach in Chinese ordinary Senior High Schools, in the hope of finding an effective writing approach.The subjects are 108 students of Senior One from an ordinary senior high school in Nanjing Jiangsu province. There are 18 classes in Senior One. Class 6 was selected as the control class and Class 7 was the experimental class; they were taught by the same teacher, and the same textbooks and workbooks were employed in both classes. The students in the two classes are divided according to their scores of entrance exam when they came to the senior high school.The present study involved 3 phases. In the first phase, Questionnaire 1 was administered to 108 students in the classes the author taught at the beginning of the autumn semester. The students were asked to choose any one of the answers from the statements. In responding to the statements, the subjects were asked to consider their previous writing experience. Therefore, students'answers reflected their interest, confidence and attitudes towards writing.The second phase lasted for six and a half months. Students in both classes were assigned to write 5 compositions which belong to different genres. The topics of these compositions are about the students'hobbies, experiences, attitudes toward certain social phenomena, letters, and so on. Due to time and energy restraints and diversified stages of process approach, the result of these 5compositions were not all collected by the author, among which, only 4 were collected. They were entitled: (1)My ideal school,(2) Camping on the top of Purple Mountain is enjoyable or not?, ( 3)The introduction of your school English Corner(4)Is it necessary to build a virtual reality cinema? The reason why the author chose those themes is that they are related to topics of the text book. The materials of the textbook supply the students with rich information about the topic for listening, speaking, and reading. Reading passages in the textbook can be treated as writing models. In addition, these themes are close to students'daily life. Each writing class lasts 45 minutes, conducted in the last class of one unit in the experimental and the control class. But the instructional interventions were quite different. In the experimental class, the new approach was integrated into curriculum according to the procedures mentioned below, while the other, the control class, used the traditional product approach ( there are no full instructions, no writing skills, and the evaluating way is only to give a score and comment). After students finish the writing each time, their"products"in both experimental and control classes were compared. Relating to the research question, the study only concerns two aspects of writing: content and language accuracy.In the third phase, the students in the experimental class were asked to complete Questionnaire II. Then the author can compare the results of the questionnaires and find whether different teaching methods evoke different levels of interest, confidence and attitudes towards writing. After that, both total scores and writing part scores in the two classes were collected.The use of the new teaching writing approach can be intimidating at first. In the experiment, the author has sensed that the students can do better if some proper approach was adopted. They have not only changed their attitudes to English writing, but also gained greater confidence and improved their interest in it.After the experiment, the author deeply feels that teaching process writing to students and yet challenging. Quantitative changes are identified in students. Given more authentic communicative and meaningful themes, the students'long term memory is stimulated and they have a lot to write. The diversified and well structured input in terms of clear teaching and demonstration, a wide variety of teaching and learning materials, brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing and publishing all contribute to students'mastery of writing skills. The process they underwent has equipped them with skills in writing. A change in the marking criteria has released the teachers and they became more tolerant and students were given the chance to share their own product and this adds incentives to writing. All these success makes the author firmly believe process writing's bright prospect.In this paper, while using the approach, should we take advantages of every teaching approach and absorb the proper factors to improve our teaching? According to the situation of Chinese junior high schools, does the shift from the product approach to process approach mean to abandon product? As for writing, the students in Senior One really need concrete, basic, meticulous help in language, such as words and phases, organization techniques. For this reason, Can we offer the students model texts, words and phrases, and appropriate organization techniques of presenting written materials? Can we guide students to read and analyze model paragraphs and essays so that students can easily write on their own? If the students can learn how to generate their ideas, develop their ideas in the process of writing to achieve their final aim in the real world, would their final products be more accurate, creative, active, expressive and convincing? This paper describes an application of process-oriented writing and attempts to answer the above questions.
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