An Experimental Study Of A Combined Reading-Writing Teaching Model In Senior High School English

Each unit in senior high school English text books is made up of four different periods in which reading and writing periods are specially designed as two separate periods. In addition, In NMET reading comprehension and writing make up 65 points in NMET. So reading and writing play an important part in the students' English study in high schools. That is, reading teaching and writing teaching are important components in English teaching in high schools.How to teach reading and writing effectively has aroused general concern among high school teachers. For a long time, main attention is fixed on vocabulary and grammar in high school reading teaching, which leads to students' slow reading speed and poor understanding ability. Also, most teachers in high schools in China limit their writing teaching to words, phrases, sentences and grammar. Some teachers even treat the students' writing as their homework. The writing skill of most students is far from satisfactory. Some even cannot write a correct sentence. Too many errors and mistakes make their writing a failure without coherence or persuasiveness. However, whether it is a reading or writing material, it must be a text. If the teacher explains the text without analyzing its structure and its writing skill, it's impossible for the students to understand the text to the full. Therefore, the author distributes questionnaires to some students in Grade one in Wuhan No.2 High School. These questionnaires concern teachers' strategies of reading and writing teaching, the process of reading and writing teaching, the awareness of discource analysis and writing skills, learners' reading, writing strategies and habits and the effect of our English reading and writing teaching.The results of the questionnaries show that most teachers and students haven't taken the discource analysis and writing skills seriously in their reading and writing teaching and learning practice. But this problem has become a great obstacle to the development of students' reading and writing competence. In addition, there is a high requirement in the aspect of reading and writing competence for high school students in the new English Course Criterion.The examination questions in NMET aimed at testing reading and writing competence. All these questions urge the application of a practical and effective approach to high School English reading and writing teaching.Combining her practual teaching experience and the systematic study of comprehensible input/output hypothesis and the theory of discource analysis, the author proposes the combination of reading teaching and writing teaching in high school English teaching. With the specific texts, the author discusses how to combine reading teaching and writing teaching. Firstly, we can develop the students' language sense by asking them to read all kinds of passages. Secondly, we can develop the students' ability to form a text by analyzing the structure of a text. Thirdly, we can improve the ability of expressing themselves in English by training their writing-level skills with the aid of the reading materials. Fourthly, we can explain the structures and patterns to help the students predict the form and content of a text. Lastly, we can use some other teaching activities, such as changing, retelling, shortening, reading aloud, and so on. With the texts in different genres, the author discusses how to analyze different textual patterns and writing skills, such as narrative, descriptive, expository writings and argumentative writings. Meanwhile, the author analyzes the coherence and cohesion of the text from the angle of a text's micro-structure.In order to prove it's workable to apply the combination of reading teaching and writing teaching to high school English reading and writing teaching, the author carried out a long-term experiment with two classes of Grade One in Wuhan No.2 High school, whose English teacher is the author herself. There're fifty-two students in the experimental class and fifty students in the control class. The experiment began on Sept. 15, 2007 and ended on Jan. 15, 2008. The whole experiment lasted twenty weeks and the experimental class has made greater progresss in their English reading comprehension and writing competence in comparison with the control class. The result of the general examinations with a common test paper for all the students from Grade one in our school is feasible with actual and scientific data. The outcome of the experiment proves that it is a success to apply the combination of reading and writing teaching to high school English reading and writing teaching. The work is less, but the result is better.Finally, the author summaries the thesis, addresses its limitations and at the same time makes some suggestions as to the ways of improving English reading, writing teaching and learning in senior high schools in China.