A Study On Senior High School Writing Teaching

As the overall ability of utilizing English is emphasized in Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards, writing competence, as the most important part of it, should be taken seriously. Since the implementation of curriculum reform is going on, the proportion of writing test has increased in the college entrance examination, which makes it more important and more urgent to improve the students'writing ability. Based on the present situation of the Teaching of English Writing in the Curriculum Reform Demonstration Zones, applying the constructivism theory to the writing is illustrated in the paper. To enable the students construct their discourse and achieve the requirements of the Curriculum Standards, the writer introduced four new models of writing teaching and practicing. And the effect upon real teaching has been proved by carrying an experiment. As an experienced teacher, I think it necessary to probe such a way of writing teaching. The paper consists of three parts.In the first part, the necessity to do such a research has been clearly pointed out in the paper. Backed by the survey, the paper analyzes the current situation of English writing teaching in high schools. The survey shows that English writing teaching has not been carried out in accordance with the Curriculum Standards. Though the requirements are stricter, yet teachers and students are confused about what to do. Thus, the students are slow in constructing their discourse. To improve such a situation, the writer proposed such an assumption that in order to achieve the requirements of the Curriculum Standards and improve writing teaching, constructivism and discourse-based teaching methodology should be introduced.In the second part, the writer reviewed constructivism theory and discourse-related theory to find out the relation between them.And in the third part, according to the theory, the writer explored how to create"scenarios"and"meaning construction"and put forward the four models—length approach, basic text convergence training, reading to promote writing, and Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, then an experiment was followed. The models are quite different from the previous ones which focus on words, sentences and grammar. As they are in consistency with the concepts of the New Curriculum, they are based on the discourse and student-centered ideas when they are put in practice. In the actual operation, models go along with activities to help the students construct cohesive texts in an active and cooperative way.In order to prove the models'effect on real teaching, the writer carried out an experiment which lasted 8 months. The analysis of the results and the comparison between the experimental class and the controlled one shows that the effect of the strategies above is conspicuous.