An Experimental Study On Process Approach To EFL Writing Teaching In Senior High School

In recent years, more and more teachers have realized the important role of writing in English language teaching. The trend seems to have been reinforced by the new writing objectives in the newly promulgated Senior School Curriculum Criterion and new marking criteria of NMET. Yet, despite the strenuous efforts made by teachers and students, English writing is still the most challenging and threatening course for most students. One major actor accounting for this fact is that our teaching practice still falls back on the traditional product-oriented approach. Such practice seems to have ignored cognitive factors of the writing process. The writing process is recursive and non-linear. While writing, students exhibit a variety of behaviors such as pre-writing, drafting; reviewing, revising and editing. The major concern of the present thesis is to explore and apply a process-oriented approach to teaching writing that may be suitable for Chinese school and to verify its effectiveness and feasibility. The study attempts to answer the following research questions:1) Is the process approach to teaching writing helpful in changing the students' attitudes and beliefs towards writing?2) Can students' writing ability, both in content and language be improved through the new approach?3) Can students in the experimental class do better than those in the control class in the exam after the experiment?The subjects are 140 students from 2 intact classes in Grade One in No.6 Middle school, Wuwei city, Gansu province. During sixteen weeks instructional intervention, the teacher carried out the process approach to teaching writing in the experimental class.Three instruments were used in the research: two questionnaires related to writing attitudes and beliefs; scores of ten compositions concerning content and language; final exam grades. By analyzing the collected data, the research finds: 1) after the experiment the students were feeling more confident in writing than before. They gained interest in writing and welcomed this new approach to teaching writing. Their attitudes and beliefs towards writing changed dramatically. 2) the students' ability in meaning development has improved greatly, but not in language accuracy. 3) the students in the experimental class do better than those in the control class in the exam after the experiment.It is hoped that this thesis will help the Chinese high school English teachers to have a better understanding of the process writing, and more and more teachers can apply this approach to their own teaching practice.