An Empirical Study On The Use Of Original Text In Writing And Writing In Foreign Language Teaching

As one of the basic skills in language learning, writing is vital for the English language learners. It is also the embodiment of the English language learners’ comprehensive ability of employing the language. However, people tend to treat reading and writing as two independent elements. Recently, as people constantly change and improve the relationship between reading and writing, people recognize that there exists very close relationship between reading and writing, which is inseparable. Real writing task should be based on a certain amount of reading tasks.On this basis, functional school puts forward "Reading-to-Write Cycle" teaching method and the "Reading-to-Write tasks". In the process of Reading-to-Write tasks, English learners always employ the information of the original texts.This research attempts to find out how learners use the original texts in the process of writing to realize the full use of resources. The research questions are:(1) How do English majors make use of original reading materials in reading-to-write tasks? (2) Does there exist significant difference in different levels of English majors when they employ the original reading materials in the process of reading-to-write? (3) What’s English majors’attitude towards the use of original reading materials in reading-to-write tasks?An empirical of two-month research in conducted. The 44 subjects are all English majors from the School of Foreign Languages, Tianjin Polytechnic University. The pre-test and post-test were employed, the result of which is computed via the SPSS 17.0. In addition, a questionnaire and an interview are used to investigate learners’attitude towards "reading-to-write" tasks.The findings reveal significant gains in the learners English language proficiency scores, which proves the fact that "reading-to-write" is an efficient way to improve English language learners writing ability. English language learners tend to make use of many strategies to make use of the original reading materials, such as integrating and making using of the original reading materials, making use of the structure and discourse of the original reading materials. Besides, there exists a significant difference in the understanding of the reading materials in which the low score team is not so good than other teams. This research provides some solutions to the traditional teaching method. It is hoped that the findings of the present study will offer some implications for English majors’writing teaching in China.