Effects Of Reading-to-write On English Majors' Writing Quality

This study was undertaken to investigate effects of reading-to-write on English majors'writing quality in terms of content, organization and language. An experiment was conducted to compare their writing quality before and after reading the model essays in terms of content, organization and language.The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. What effects does reading-to-write have on English majors'writing quality in terms of content?2. What effects does reading-to-write have on English majors'writing quality in terms of organization?3. What effects does reading-to-write have on English majors'writing quality in terms of language?The subjects in this study were 33 juniors majoring in English at School of Foreign Languages, Yangzhou University. The instruments of this study were two writing tests and a questionnaire. Before and after the reading task, writing tasks were given, which would serve as pre-test and post-test in this research. After the second writing task, a questionnaire was conducted to investigate the students'use of reading strategies. All the data in this study, including compositions in the two tests and the questionnaire, were collected by their writing teacher in the writing class. Data analysis involved double scoring, calculation and comparison. All the compositions of the two tests were scored by the researcher and her classmate with the same analytic rating rubric from Cohen (2005), which includes three key rating categories: content, organization and language. Paired-samples t-test was employed to calculate and compare writing quality in terms of content, organization and language. Also, the mean of students'response level of each item of the questionnaire was calculated.The major findings from this study are as follows:Firstly, reading-to-write has a positive effect on English majors'writing quality in terms of content. Quantitatively, their content improved most by 2.97 at .001. Qualitatively, students used more powerful and relevant arguments to support their opinions, and more appropriate and convincing evidence to support their arguments. ?This finding may be attributed to two factors. One is comprehensible input, that is, the strictly-selected and carefully-refined model texts for the reading-to-write task. The other is their close attention to the content information, like opinions, arguments and evidence.Secondly, reading-to-write also has a positive effect on English majors'writing quality in terms of organization. Though their organization improved the least by 0.87 of the three, there was a significant difference at .01, which shows that their second writing is better organized and more coherent. The reason for their improvement in organization may be the well organized and perfectly coherent model texts. Their exposure to texts with good organization seems to help them learn about organization, which is in line with Yoshimura's (2009) finding.Thirdly, reading-to-write improved their writing quality significantly in terms of language. For one thing, their writing quality in terms of language improved by 2.09 at .001. For another, most students made fewer language errors, and their second writing showed more effective choice of words and more complex sentence structures. This may be because that there are many alternative useful words and phrases and sentence patterns in the model texts for students to use and that their first writing alerted them to expressions in the reading materials, which confirms Swain's(1998) claim that"output promotes noticing of linguistic features in input".This study provides some implications. First, writing teachers could integrate comprehensible, interesting and relevant reading materials into their teaching. Second, sometimes formal instruction is necessary to help students focus their attention on the features of the model texts for the purpose of developing their ability to produce those features accurately. Third, to provide input for their writing, students should be encouraged to read extensively outside the classroom and to form a good habit of reading.This study has three limitations. First, the number of samples employed in this study may be not large enough to be generalizable to the whole population. Second, this study was limited to a reading-to-write task requiring argumentation, and with many other reading-to-write tasks, task effects may occur. Third, the whole experiment was conducted in one week in this study, which cannot guarantee its long-term effects on writing quality.