On The Application Of Long Sentence And Sentence Group Translation To College English Writing Teaching

Nowadays, the widely used approaches to English writing teaching, such as product approach, process approach and genre approach, are evidently effective in developing students'writing skills in text structure, content or conception. But according to experience of the present author and the error analysis of students'compositions by some researchers, the key problem in college English writing is not in the aspects of text structure, main content and so on, but in the syntax, that is, students don't know how to construct and connect sentences according to English syntactic features.Based on foreign scholars'research about the effect of translation on writing teaching and major syntactic distinctions between English and Chinese, this thesis put forward the feasibility of applying long sentence and sentence group translation method to college English writing teaching, and tested the positive effect of this method on improving college students'writing level, especially in the syntactic aspect. The research questions include: 1) Compared with traditional approaches to writing teaching, can long sentence and sentence group translation method more effectively improve students'writing ability on the whole? 2) Can long sentence and sentence group translation method help students make more progress in syntactic aspect? 3) How does long sentence and sentence group translation method influence students'English writing, in terms of syntax? 4) Will long sentence and sentence group translation method have positive effect on other aspects of students'English learning?Directed by these research questions, the present author selected respectively 30 students from two parallel classes of Chinese Education Majors from Zhengzhou Branch of Henan Normal University as the subjects of this research by pretest, and then conducted a teaching experiment lasting for 14 weeks in the two classes (one is the experimental class, and the other the control class). The long sentence and sentence group translation method was adopted in the experimental class, while the traditional product approach in the control class. After the experiment, a posttest and an interview were carried out, and the results of the pretest, the posttest and the interview were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with SPSS 13.0The findings of the experiment and the interview were: 1) Compared with traditional approaches, the long sentence and sentence group translation method can better improve students'writing level on the whole. 2) The long sentence and sentence group translation has more positive effect on the syntactic aspect than content and vocabulary. 3) The positive effect of long sentence and sentence group translation method on the syntactic aspect of students'English writing is mainly embodied in grammatical correctness, sentence structure, information order, and the cohesion and coherence. 4) And moreover, this method can also help students in their English learning from other aspects like vocabulary usage, reading comprehension and so on.According to the findings of the research, the author brought up suggestions for writing teaching correspondingly, and pointed out the limitations of this research and proposals for the future study.