A Study Of Improving Senior Students' English Writing Ability By Integrating English Writing With English Reading

It is commonly accepted that writing is the weak point in the four English skills' development in the secondary foreign language education. Set in such situation, a lot of teachers are paying much attention on the writing topic, hoping to find a solution to improve student's writing ability. In the west, foreign language teaching puts much attention on the correlation between reading and writing, confirming that reading is the basis and prerequisite of the writing, and writing demands comprehensive skills, both are closely related. Although in China the contemporary textbook follows the principle that writing should base on reading, reading and teaching are practiced as two independent skills in practical teaching, which prevents students forming new reading habits that writing can be developed in the process of deliberate reading, thus results in students' inefficiency in writing. How to change the situation in writing teaching is one of the main problems we English teachers have to encounter in high schools. Based on Krashen's Comprehensive Input Hypothesis and Swain's Comprehensive Output Hypothesis, and by the way of theoretical research,status analysis and experimental plan, the present thesis summarized the newest study achievements about the relationship between reading and writing and put forward a new method for improving the ability of English writing. That is combing reading activities with writing practices in English reading classes.Firstly, the paper analyzes the situation of English writing teaching in high school in China. Writing is neither much valued nor taught in an appropriate method in high schools. As a result, there exist many problems in small vocabulary and lack of variety in sentence pattern and so on in the student's writing. With consideration of these problems and of the demand of English writing in the New English Course Syllabus as well as current research results on this topic, we suggest that it is necessary to integrate writing practices with the teaching of reading. In the following part of it, the author demonstrates the basic theories of reading and writing and reviews the results of the studies on the relationship of reading and writing. Then, from the teaching practice, the author shows the processes of integrating writing practices with the teaching of reading. The whole processes are divided into three periods. The first period is information input. In this period, the teacher aims to help students master the language knowledge and writing skills. The second period is information digestion. In this period, the teacher asks the students to review and consolidate the knowledge and writing skills by the way of reciting. The third period is information output. In this period, the teacher designs a series of writing practices to develop the students' writing ability.In order to verify the effect of this approach, the author carries out an experiment in two classes in Zaoyang Guangwu senior high school. In the experiment the students in experimental class are trained to learn the reading materials with more reading strategies and skills which are more student-centered and combining with a lot of writing exercises, while the method used in the controlled class is more teacher-centered and the students were taught to learn the texts just using the traditional method of teaching reading without any writing exercises. By analyzing the results of the experiment, the author found that the performances of the writing in EC were significantly better than those of students in CC. It means that the method of teaching reading combining with writing exercises can improve the ability of English writing in senior high schools.Finally, the author summarizes the thesis, addresses its limitations and at the same time makes some suggestions as to the ways of improving the English teaching and learning in high schools in China.