An Empirical Study On Application Of Process Approach To EFL Writing Teaching

In recent years, with the rapid process of globalization, the implement of New Curriculum Reform and high demands of NMET, the increasing teachers have realized writing plays an important role in EFL/ESL learning. However, despite students and teachers all have made great efforts on it, English writing is still the most challenging skill for most students. One major factor is that our teaching practice still focuses on final product ignoring the writing process. Such practice seems to have ignored cognitive factor of writing process, which is recursive, non-linear. While writing, students experience such procedures as pre-writing, drafting, reviewing, revising, proofreading and editing.The study aims to explore and apply a new process-oriented approach to senior writing teaching that combines students'textbooks and considers the real students'competence, and to verify its effectiveness and feasibility.The study attempts to answer the following questions:1)Can the process approach help students get more interested in English writing?2) Can the process approach help improve the students'English writing proficiency? Are there any differences among HPSs, MPSs and LPSs? Why?The researcher carried out the research at a rural ordinary Senior High School in Shizuishan city, Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region. The subjects are 94 students from two parallel classes in Senior Two. The researcher applied the process approach to writing teaching in the experimental class, which lasted four months. Three instruments were used in the research:two questionnaires, an interview, pre-test and post-test. After the experiment, by virtue of statistics program SPSS 16.0, analyzing the collected data, the author came to the following conclusion:1) The process approach can help students get more interested in English writing and English writing lessons.2) The application of process approach contributes to improving students'writing proficiency. However, it had different effects on HPSs, MPSs and LPSs:the beneficial effect on MPSs was most significant, while its effects on HPSs and LPSs were relatively less.It is hoped that this thesis will help the Chinese teachers in Senior High School to have a better understanding of the process writing approach. And they are suggested to apply this approach to conduct English writing teaching practice after fully considering their student's realistic English proficiency and combining concrete textbook, in order to promote students writing proficiency.