On Application And Research Of Process Approach In College English Writing Teaching

As we all know, one of the primary objectives of the21st century is that college studentscan write fluently in foreign language. Writing is a form of written communication and acomprehensive use of listening, speaking and writing skills. The improvement of writingability can promote students' all-round development (王初明,2000：212). However, in termsof the objective of communicative competence, English teaching has always been'time-consuming and inefficient'(戴炜栋,2001；周燕,2010) for a long time. College Englishwriting teaching is even much worse. For non-English major college students, English writinghasn't been given full attention and is simply included in the range of intensive class(高尚昆,1999). With more intensive contents and limited time, as a result, writing class is often a mereformality and traditional writing method still dominates. Although teachers are often supposedto make comments on their writing, the entire writing process is carried out between studentand teacher in a lineal form. Students only have the first draft and the teacher just checks itonly once. Assessment focuses on grammar and vocabulary mistakes, and therefore, writingbecomes another form of grammar class (程静英,1994). Students are lack of realcommunicative wishes and their initiative and creativity are so limited that they are alwaysstruggling to improve their writing ability.Through generalizing and analyzing the scholars' research results home and abroad, we canknow that college students' English writing level hasn't changed a lot. In the thesis, the authoranalyzes the reasons by pre-experimental questionnaire, knowing that the lack of languageinput and writing strategies is the key problem. Consequently, the present study starts from thetwo aspects, connects them with practice and applies to the teaching of college English writing.From the perspective of second language acquisition (SLA), writing is an output process basedon input. Krashen's input theory is an essential part in SLA. According to the theory, qualityand quantity of input plays a decisive role; From the strategic point of view, writing strategy isan important factor affecting the level of writing, and the study of writing strategies helps toimprove students' writing skills in English (任风雷,2006). In view of this, the authorintroduces the process writing method into the actual teaching. The theories such as Krashen's input hypothesis and some writing strategies of Wen Qiufang are used to illustrate the writingprocess in an attempt to improve students ' writing skills.Present discussion on process approach still stays at the level of theory and experiencesummary whereas there is few empirical researches. In China, although a lot of experts andscholars make research on it, no practical breakthrough has been made and students' writinglevel is still quite low. That is because most teachers still take the product-focused approach intheir teaching and the study of non-English major writing is still relatively limited. As a result,the author poses the following research questions:1. Can process approach improve students'writing skills and increase their interest and confidence in writing in certain environment?2.Input theory and writing strategies can improve students' writing abilities with the use ofprocess approach?The thesis first makes a literature review and explains the related theory, describing theproblems of college students' writing, and analyzing its causes. Then, the author makes theresearch design using the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, which aims todo some research on the relationship between process-oriented approach and writing level.Research subjects are124non-English major freshmen in a university, and the experiment ismade in class. Research tools includes: questionnaire, classroom observation, interviews andpre-test and post-test. There are four steps of the research:(1)(before the experiment) all thecollege students finish the questionnaire, pre-test and individual interviews.(2) According tothe relevant steps, there will be a10-week writing practice using process-oriented approach, atthe same time, the author observes and records the college students' performance when theyare using the process-oriented approach in class.(3)(after the experiment) anotherquestionnaire is handed out to get an immediate feedback after10weeks' writing training andhaving a post-test and individual interviews again.(4)Using statistics software to analyze theresults, it is concluded that process-oriented approach can promote and improve students'writing skills and enhance their interest in writing. Of course, there're some shortcomings inthis research on account of all kinds of reasons. Meanwhile, it is believed that this study willgive us some inspirations and suggestions in college English teaching.