A Comparison Between Product Approach And Process Approach In Writing Instruction On Senior High School Students With Learning Disability

In second language teaching and learning, writing is considered as the most difficult of the four basic linguistic skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing. For many years, the teaching of English writing has always been ignored in senior high school. The result of NMET shows that the students' writing has not met the requirements of New English Curriculum Standards. The situation of English writing in rural high schools is worse. So it is necessary to investigate an instruction of writing approach that is suitable to the senior high school students in rural area.The study investigated the effect of the product approach and the process approach on the senior high school students with learning disability in rural area, and to find out which approach is more efficient in helping students improve writing proficiency. The study was carried out in ways of experiments and questionnaire investigations. The purpose of the study is to solve the following issues:1) What effect does product approach have on Chinese senior high students with learning disability? 2) What effect does process approach have on Chinese senior high students with learning disability? 3) Which approach is more effective for Chinese senior high school students with learning disability?85 students (40 in control group and 45 in experimental group) from Quanzhou No.15 Middle School participated in the experiment which lasted 19 weeks. Both groups were required to take the pretest and the first questionnaire before the experiment to decide on the writing proficiency and their attitude towards writing, and then they were given the mid-test in the middle of the experiment and the posttest and the second questionnaire at the end of the experiment to decide on the improvements in writing performance and attitude. The scores from the tests were collected and analyzed statistically by the author to get findings, which prove that the product approach is more effective in helping senior high students with learning disability improve their writing ability, although both the product approach and the process approach lead to improvements after one term.