A Study Of Write-to-Learn In Senior High School English Teaching

The aim of this thesis is to introduce the teaching -writing technique of write- to- learn (WTL) in high school.The method write-to-learn is originally proposed by Professor Wang Chuming from University of Guangdong Foreign Studies. Through the practice of write-to-learn, students can improve their English. When the students write compositions, they have to use more words , expressions and sentence structures. The method has been carried out in University of Guangdong Foreign Studies and Wuhan University so far with encouraging success. Professor Li Li, head of the Foreign Language College, South-Western Normal University, has made some comments on the effect of the write-to-learn and confirmed that write-to-learn can be used in high schools.In this thesis we discuss the importance of writing and the requirement for the students in high school, and analyze the necessity and possibility of applying write-to-learn in high school. Considering some similarities between senior III students and fresh men in the university—their age, psychological state, life experiences and English knowledge. We employed write-to-learn among the senior III students in Pingdu No. 9 High School and carried out the relevant techniques to testify to some rules concerned with write-to-learn among senior students.There are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter one is literature review, which deals with the previous write-to-learn research at home and abroad. Chapter two is about writing theory ,writing requirements in New Curriculum Standards in use and the notion and theories of write-to-learn. Chapter three is composed of two parts. One is a write-to-learn experiment. The participants are 130 students of senior high school. The research instrument is a two-group pretest-posttest experiment to collect data and see whether the write-to-learn experiment(the independent variable) can enhance L2 achievements (the dependent variable)with other variables being controlled. The data are collected by the thesis writer in person. The other is a survey study. The subjects are also the same students in my two classes. Chapter four deals with the implications drawn from the experiment. To sum up , the study results show that (1)writing compositions can significantly improve L2 learners'English; (2) the L2 learners feel positive towards writing compositions in English. Therefore, write-to-learn method can be generalized.