The Integration Of Contrastive Studies Between English And Chinese In Senior High School EFL Writing Classes

The purpose of this research is to find a more effective method of teaching English writing to Chinese senior high school students. The results of the research can help high school teachers of English gain insights into the theory of contrastive studies and their application in writing classes.The past research showed that contrastive studies were usually applied in teaching material development, and the application of them in class could only increase students' awareness of the differences between native language and target language instead of producing obvious effect in students' writings.In this research, an experiment was carried out to test the effect of contrastive teaching mainly in the areas of transitional words, unity, idiomatic writing and so on. After the experiment, an interview was carried out with fifteen students in the experimental group to learn about their opinions on this method.The experiment results show contrastive method can produce the most obvious effect in transitional words, less effect in paragraph development and idiomatic writing and the least effect in unity. Most students indicate that contrastive teaching is effective and more effective than traditional method in the evaluated areas. Contrastive teaching can increase students' interest in English writing and produce a sudden enlightenment in the English way of writing. Besides, the differences of requirements between English and Chinese are diminishing in the area of topic sentence.The thesis includes five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction including the backgrounds of the research the questions addressed in it, and the outline of the thesis.The second chapter is a literature review. It includes the illustrations of contrastive studies and the pedagogical application of them.The third chapter is an analysis of the present English writing teaching method, including the characteristics, requirements, difficulties and possible solutions to English writing at middle schoolThe forth chapter presents a detailed description of the proposed research's procedure. The 100 students were selected to be the subjects in the one-year experiment. After that a semi-open interview was done with fifteen students randomly selected from the experimental group. The purpose was to find the opinions about this teaching method. The fifth chapter is a discussion about some problems and some suggestions on ESL teaching in high school.The last chapter is a conclusion that includes (1) an integrative summary of the most important results, (2) implications in theory and practice, (3) and some defects about this research and suggestions for future research about this topic.