A New Way Of Developing Students' English Writing Ability

Nowadays, the teaching of College English writing in many universities has been caught in a"vicious circle": the teacher often spends a large amount of time and energy correcting students'spelling and collocation mistakes, but pays little attention to the content of the writing, as a result, most students sacrifice rich content for the sake of fewer mistakes in writing, having relatively low writing motivation and writing proficiency. How to improve the situation so as to meet the writing objectives set in College English Curriculum Requirements is one of the urgencies to be dealt with in college English teaching reform.A review of the literature on teaching writing brought the newly developed e-portfolio and well-received process writing into the author's view. E-portfolio's formative assessment makes process writing possible.In this study, the author proposes an assumption of combining e-portfolio's formative assessment with process writing to eliminate the limitations of product approach with summative assessment applied in traditional English writing classes. In order to test the validity of this new approach, the author addresses the following questions: 1. Whether or not combining e-portfolio's formative assessment with process approach in writing contributes to enhancing learners'interest in English writing? 2. Whether or not applying e-portfolio's formative assessment and process approach to English writing increases learners'output? 3. Whether or not applying e-portfolio's formative assessment and process approach in English writing improves learners'English writing proficiency?Half-a-year's experiment is carried out in two undergraduate classes of Chongqing University, in which the questionnaire, testing and so on are adopted. After the experiment, the results of the quantitative tests and qualitative assessment are analyzed with the help of SPSS, Word and other relevant software, showing whether there are significant differences in students'writing attitudes and writing competence between the experimental and the control classes.The results of the experiment show that both the experimental group and the control group have improved their writing proficiency, while the experimental group makes more progress than the control group. And the students learning writing based on e-portfolio's formative assessment and process writing demonstrate higher levels of writing interest and writing ability than those who are trained only in the traditional classes. Moreover, the students of the experimental group enjoy more chances to reflect on their own learning, thus a higher sense of personal responsibility for learning is developed.In the last chapter, the author summarizes the major findings of this study, analyzes some pedagogical implications and limitations, and gives some recommendations for further study. The author hopes this study can offer some implications for the teaching of English writing on non-English majors...