On Imitating Writing And Its Role In The Improvement Of JMS English Writing Ability

Learning a foreign language cannot be successful without writing taken into account, for writing can not only help promote and work out the language knowledge acquired, but also afford a means of language output and communication. Such importance of writing is strongly emphasized in the New Curriculum Criterion for China's Middle School Writing Teaching, which makes higher demands upon our junior middle school students for a comprehensive English competence. As one of the four integral parts of our English teaching and learning—listening, speaking, reading and writing, English writing is always focused on as a very important basic skill, the attainment of which can promote the development of other basic skills in English learning. Therefore, writing practice has been regarded as an effective measure to improve the middle school students' comprehensive ability to use English. However, English writing teaching and learning, for quite a long time, have not been quite successful to our English teachers and students who consider it a hard nut for them to crack. To solve this tough problem, we should, attaching great importance to writing teaching and learning, try to find out effective ways to improve our students' writing ability inspired by the middle school English curriculum reform.But how can we solve the problem in our present-day writing teaching? The answer to the question may vary from person to person as there are different measures which can be adopted in the light of different students' taste. Generally speaking, the most common and general one is to ask our students to do as much writing practice as possible while focusing on listening, speaking and reading. However, this method is too general to be put into practice and we need a more specific teaching method in the specific process of English writing teaching. To me, imitating writing practice is a better choice which can be said to be a basic and effective measure for our junior middle school students to improve their writing skill. Imitating writing is a kind of writing practice inspired by the hints in the authentic English materials students have just read. It can help our students know better how to begin a passage or how to arrange the content or what sentences they should use when they begin to learn to write. Such writing practice can not only make our students master the basic writing techniques and discourse strategies but also cultivate their feel for the English language and improve their comprehensive English competence.This thesis mainly expounds how to employ the imitating writing method to help our junior middle school students improve their writing ability and make clear the significance and workability of this method in today's junior middle schools. It focuses on the question from the two perspectives of theory and practice and provides solutions to the following three questions: 1) What are the theoretical basis and specific ways of imitating writing teaching? 2) Can imitating writing help improve our students' writing ability and ultimately raise the level of their comprehensive English competence? 3) What is the specific model of imitating writing and how to evaluate it? The whole thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One addresses the importance and necessity of this study, and Chapter Two serves as a brief introduction to the study of English writing both at home and abroad and how English writing teaching is done in China's junior middle school as well. Following it are two chapters which are the focus of this paper. Chapter Three discusses the question of the nature of imitating writing and it's importance in writing teaching and Chapter Four, focused on the application of the imitating writing teaching model in our junior middle school and its working procedure, analyzes the data collected from the experiment and proves the workability of this writing teaching method. And the last chapter, Chapter Five, is the sums up of the whole paper, pointing out both the strengths and weaknesses of this teaching method and meanwhile making some suggestions regarding to its further improvement and research.