A Study On Exploring English Writing Difficulties Of Senior High Students

Writing, as one of the four basic language skills, can not be ignored in language learning. New English Curriculum Standards points out that every senior high student should command the preliminary practical writing skill.However, the current situation of writing teaching to senior high students is not optimistic. There are all sorts of difficulties in their writing process. Knowing more about the students' difficulties existing in writing process is a must for teachers' effective teaching., but most of the studies for emploring the main difficulties in the high school students' writing process were based on authors' experience rather than fact-based evidence.The author of this study, then, tries to fill in this gap by carrying out a study among 308 students in three high schools in Pingdingshan with quantitative and qualitative methods.The results of the investigation showed high school students have a strong difficulty sense in language in writing process. Major difficulties identified in the investigation are the lack of vocabulary, using complex sentence structures, lack of content, difficulties in using tense, voice and word order. Further research found difficulty in spelling and advanced vocabulary. The study also found that the views of the difficulties between teachers and students are almost identical.The investigation also involved three other aspects of writing, writing objectives, writing habits, and writing requirements. According to the result, a series of problem-solving proposals are proposed, such as arousing the interest, strengthening basic knowledge, expanding reading, error correction and improving the quality of teachers.The paper includes five parts. Part I provides the research background followed by the discussion of the purpose and significance of the current study. Part II reviews the past literature in writing teaching in empirical studies of English writing. It then focuses on the empirical research on writing difficulties, and notes the limitations of studies on the current senior high school English writing. Part III presents a framework of the investigation. First, intensive interviews were carried out with six students in three different English proficiency levels from a high school in Pingdingshan in order to explore the difficulties in writing course at the initial stage. Then, based on the results of the interviews, a questionnaire was designed for a survey among 308 high school students in another three high schools which generated the important data for the discovery of the main difficulties of writing. The results of the investigation then are reported in Part IV, which serves as the ground for further analysis. In Part V, the auther summarizes findings and presents the implications, and makes several suggestions for improving the teaching of writing to high school students. Finally, the paper concludes by pointing out some limitations of the study and the direction of further research.