An Experimental Research On The Application Of Writing Strategies To Improve Students' Writing Ability In Senior High School

In the English learning, listening, speaking, reading and writing are an organic entirety. Language teachers should try to develop students'abilities in all the four areas by way of helping students learn properly and effectively. As an output activity, writing plays an important role in English language teaching, because it is a way to use the language they have learned to communicate their ideas. The improvement of students'writing skills can benefit the development of other language skills. Therefore, it's significant to develop students'writing skills and abilities. However, a questionnaire survey which has been made on the students of Senior One of Baogang No.5 High School about the application of the writing strategies reveals that at present the teaching of writing is relatively weak in Senior English teaching, and few relevant writing strategies are used and trained in the teaching of writing. So the students are tired of English writing and show little interest in it, which is really worrying. In order to deal with the problem, this research, based on the constructivist theories, aims to study how the application and the training of the relevant writing strategies influence the students'ability of writing in Senior English teaching.First of all, this paper expounds the meaning of constructivism, and points out the core of constructivism as being learner-centered teaching and exploration, discovering knowledge of the students on their own initiative, and making their own sense of the world and the experiences that surround them. Then, this paper attempts to introduce and apply a variety of writing strategies to every stage of the teaching of writing. That is, in pre-writing stage, teachers should help students develop different strategies for getting started, such as collecting information, brainstorming, and writing an outline. In the writing stage, strategies used will be self-writing, peer feedback, self-reflection, self-rewriting, teachers'evaluation. In the post-writing stage, setting up records and exhibiting products will be involved. The application of the writing strategies to the whole process of the teaching of writing turns out to bring about real interactions between teachers and students, or between students and students, which also makes the teaching of writing full of vigor. Compared to the traditional product-focused teaching of writing, the paper pays more attention to the process of writing, and regards writing itself as a process of input, process, and output or a process of thinking, learning, improving and reflecting. Besides, the paper points out teachers should give the students enough space to exploit their own potential freely, though teachers should still deliver some indispensable instructions. Teachers should help arouse the students'consciousness of creativeness, which will evoke students'activities of learning, develop the consciousness of participation, cooperation and the ability of thinking, and make further improvement of the ability of writing.In order to prove the validity of applying writing strategies to the teaching of English writing in senior high school, the author made an experiment on the two classes from Senior One of Baogang No.5 High School. Two tests were performed before and after the experiment. The two test papers are both from the standard examination for all the students in Senior 1 of our city, respectively on Sep.10 and on Dec.10, so reliability and validity can be guaranteed. From the scores of the pre-test it is obvious that the students of the two classes have roughly the same level of writing before the experiment. However, after the three-month experiment of the application of the writing strategies to the teaching of writing in the experimental class, the scores of the students of the experimental class are obviously higher than the scores of the students of the control class through a comparative analysis. So the conclusion can be drawn that the English writing ability of the students can be expectedly improved through the experiment of the application of the writing strategies to the teaching of writing in senior high school.