An Investigation Into Senior High School English Composition Writing Through Think Aloud Protocol

Writing in English is one of the most important components of Senior High School English teaching and learning and plays a pivotal role in the senior high school students' learning. This is further emphasized in Senior High School English learning and teaching by New Curriculum Standard. This article aims to find out whether there are some problems with the students' thinking in the course of writing English compositions by means of Think Aloud Protocol. The research falls into stages. In the first stage, a pilot study was adopted to gain some expertise in conducting the formal research. In the second stage, ten 11th grade students from Nantong First Middle School of Jiangsu Province were chosen as participants according to their daily English learning for gaining effective experimental data. By videotaping the students' writing process in which the participants were asked to speak aloud their thinking while writing. Based on the analysis of the transcribed think-aloud data, it was discovered that there were some problems with students' thinking strategy while writing in English. They are as follows: 1) The participants begin their writing without analyzing the writing requirements. 2) When writing, the participants lack a global planning of the composition. 3) When writing, the participants just translate the Chinese requirements into English sentence by sentence. 4) The participants fail to pay attention to English grammar and English sentence structure when writing. Besides these, the participants fail to focus on their revision of first draft and their English handwriting. This article puts forward some teaching and learning strategies for Senior High School English composition writing and some teaching and learning strategies of English composition writing in the College Entrance Examination.