The Applicational Study Of Length Approach In The Teaching Of Writing At Normal Schools

Writing is a communicative ability of written expression and a medium of exchanging ideas and information. It is also an important means of learning a language. The ultimate goal to learn English, for most Chinese students, is to gain the abilities to listen, to speak, to read, and to write. To cultivate primary writing ability is one important aspect of English teaching.However, writing used to be the part that is bound to many constrains, such as accuracy, fixed forms, requirements and pressure from exams, so writing has never received much emphasis in the classroom. And the teaching of writing in daily practice is still not effective. This is also true at normal schools. There exist many problems in normal school writing teaching, for example: 1) Importance has not been attached to writing course for a long time and it is even ignored. The students altogether only have one semester of writing training and their productive ability (speaking and writing) lagged far behind their comprehension ability (listening and reading). 2) Teaching materials are limited and out of date. 3) Some teaching methods are no longer suitable today. 4) The students are not interested in English writing and are even afraid of writing a composition. Therefore, the author tries to apply the Length Approach to English writing teaching so as to help students to improve their English writing ability and their language proficiency.Length Approach is a new type of EFL teaching of writing, first proposed by Wang Chuming (2000) aimed to get writing achievements as well as overall English proficiency for the college students of English major in the EFL context of our country. This approach advocates that through manipulation of the length requirement of writing, learners are pushed to write increasingly long compositions, thus reinforcing their sense of achievement, boosting their confidence in their ability to learn the FL, motivating further learning, thus ensuring progress in FL learning. It has been under experiments for years in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and some other universities in China and has appealed to the nationwide English researchers because of its prosperity. Later some high school English teachers began to try Length Approach in their writing teaching to promote students'language proficiency (e.g., Fang Li, 2005; Wang Fujin, 2006; Zhao Hong, 2007). However, there is little existing literature about writing long composition at normal schools.Supported by theories of Output Hypothesis (Swain, 1985) and the Affective Filter (Krashen, 1995), this study attempts to apply Length Approach to the English writing teaching in hope of improving the present writing teaching at normal schools. Therefore the author intends to conduct an experiment trying to apply Length Approach to English writing teaching, focusing on research at normal schools. This study is aimed to address the following questions: 1) Can Length Approach improve the English writing ability of normal school students? 2) Can this approach help improve the students'overall language proficiency? 3) Can Length Approach help the students develop positive feelings and promote self-confidence in English language learning?The experiment was carried out from September to December, 2008. Two intact classes were selected from the fourth-year students majored in Primary School English Teaching at Wendeng Normal School. Length Approach is applied in the experimental class (Class 1), while the traditional teaching method was used in the controlled class (Class 2). Data collection involved both scores of pretests and posttests of writing and final exams, questionnaires, and the data was analyzed by SPSS. The results of the research reveal that through the process of Length Approach writing, due to the outside classroom writing environment, much autonomy, positive evaluation and the encouraging atmosphere, the training of writing long compositions not only played a positive role in actual writing performance, but also had a potential effect on language proficiency for the normal school students in the Chinese context. As indicated by Li Li (2004), it is very necessary to move the approach from the university level down.