| In the profound sense, writing is a process of cooperative working, a process of perennial accumulating, and a process of creation. So are both native language writing and foreign language writing. However, the teaching of English writing has been puzzling the English teachers in China. There is a long-standing problem that the teaching of English writing has been in an awkward position. Both the teachers and the students have been spending too much in teaching or learning English, while they have got little. The traditional teaching of English writing is on the purpose of good results in exams. The students are provided with a certain topic and some key points (4—6 sentences) in Chinese, and what the students do is add some more ones to them and combine all these sentences into a passage, which is not so much writing as translation. The students can neither get new knowledge nor enrich their viewpoints and thoughts through such kind of writing practice. There is no need of lots of input of English language, no need of meticulous design, no need of probing into the depth of the topic, and no need of creative work in such writing process at all. The students' writing ability slays at a lower level. One of the most serious problems is that students have been dependent too much on L1 language thinking while writing in English. Negative correlation was found between L1 use in the text-generating activities and the rating on language of the L2 writing. The proportion of L1 thinking decreased with the writer s L2 development (Wang Wen-yu, Wen Qiu-fang 2002).In order to decrease the amount of L1 thinking in English writing and improve students' writing ability, this thesis advances an Interactive Writing Model based on the interactive theory by Brown, H. Douglas.The Interactive Writing Model centers on1) Why do the students depend on L1 thinking while English writing?2) Does L1 thinking have negative effect on English writing?3) Does the Interactive Writing benefit to increase effective input, decrease amount of L1 thinking and improve the students' writing ability?The author adopts the think-aloud and interviewing methods to elicit English writing processes of the students of Class 1 and Class 3, Senior 2. The amount of L1 thinking during the L2 composing process is measured and the analysis is made betweenthe amount of LI use in composing process and the L2 writing quality. The results of the pie-test show that most of the learners are dependent on LI thinking in writing, and in fact, the process of writing is almost the process of translation.An academic year later, a post-test is held in the same way. The results suggest that the teaching of Interactive Writing can lead to effective input of English and help to improve the quality of output of English. The texts are lengthened and more complex and compound sentences are used much oftener and the sentences are more complicated. The advanced students have made greater progress in English writing than those of the less advanced. The students of higher level use less Chinese words than those of the lower level while writing in English. They are less dependent on LI thinking while writing in English. But it has little effect on the students of lower level.This thesis consists of five chapters. In Chapter 1, the Introduction, the author talks of the current situation of English teaching in China, elaborates the literature review and gives a brief description of the Interactive Writing Model. In Chapter 2, the author expounds the qualities and characters of the Interactive Writing Mode. In Chapter 3, the author introduces the process of the experiment, and the statistics and analysis of the experimental data. In Chapter 4, the author analyses the collected data, and makes a brief discussion on the dala. In Chapter 5, (he author makes a conclusion on the results of the experiment, and demonstrates the limitation of the Interactive Writing Model as well as the direction of future research.
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