Developing Ability To Write Paragraph--An Empirical Study On Writing Strategy Training For Junior Middle School Students

Writing in English is becoming more and more important nowadays. As an already researched and endorsed topic, writing has been enthusiastically recommended and widely employed in EFL classrooms for a long time for developing writing skills and promoting students interested. However, little attention is paid to the teaching of writing to Junior Middle School students in China. For most Chinese students, writing in English is very difficult. Although fear of writing and some linguistic incompetence are among the leading causes to this existing problem, the lack of effective vocabulary and the strategies of writing also make writing in English a challenging task for the students.In view of this, the present study carries out writing strategies training at Junior Middle School level, intending to provide the students with a better understanding of the use of writing strategies and help them to build the skills necessary for effective paragraph writing.This thesis mainly discusses how to solve the existing problems the Junior Middle School students encounter from three aspects: words choices; sentence writing; and paragraph development. This thesis intends to conduct research on the following three questions:1. What makes writing difficult for the subject students?2. Can students employ the writing strategies effectively?3. What effects of the writing strategy training have on the writing of the concerned subjects?To answer the questions, an experiment was conducted. Two classes in Daxing district were chosen as controlled class and experimental class respectively. For the experimental class, writing strategies were introduced, while the controlled class still followed the traditional teaching. Before the experiment a questionnaire was delivered, aiming to collect some data about the existing problems in their English writing, which offered useful information for my experiment conducted later. From the data collected from the questionnaire, we can find that the biggest problem for the students is that they are lack of writing strategies to express ideas in English. The data can further show that the main cause of my students' difficulty is the lack of vocabulary and the knowledge of grammar. The experiment is divided into three periods. One period lasted for one month. During the experiment three tests were given to the two classes: Pretest, mid-test and final test. And the final findings demonstrated that the experimental class made greater progress in performing the writing tasks than the controlled class. That is to say the strategy training is effective on improving the writing abilities of the concerned students. The major findings of the present study are as follows:1. The writing strategy training played an important role on the students of the experimental class. The training effect is clear and significantly positive.2. And the students' interest in writing in the experimental class was greatly improved and they were encouraged to write in English and more activelyinvolved in the writing activities.3. It implies that the teachers should use a variety of writing activities to maintain the students' interest in writing, and help the students to form good English writing habits.It is expected that more practical experiments to study the efficacy of strategies are to be conducted in the future.