An Action Research On Improving Senior High School Learners' English Basic Writing Ability By Prewriting Activities

The general aim of senior high school's educational courses is to enhance students" integrated skills of using language. English writing is one kind of ability among the integrated skills, which is largely determined by the teaching of English writing. In the past two decades, there were many researches and practices done about the methodology of English writing both at home and abroad. In China, the students' general proficiency in English writing is low, and is in sore need of improvement. One of the major reasons identified is that not enough preparation has been done for writing, hence this paper attempts to improve senior high school learners" English basic writing ability by prewriting activities on the teacher's part on the basis of Schema Theory, Information-processing Theory and Constructivism. The research questions are:1) To what extent can prewriting activities improve high school students' Basic Writing ability? 2) How should teachers effectively organize prewriting activities for Basic Writing?The research used action research design with participants of 46 students from Class Six, Senior Three, Guangdong Overseas Chinese Middle School and it lasted for three months. The prewriting activities' training was divided into two stages. In stage one, a pretest was carried out and the students were trained with the prewriting activities for two months including brainstorming, classical invention, exchanging of sentence structures. After that, a posttest was carried out of which the results were collected and analyzed for the author's reflections. In stage two, the prewriting activities training lasted for one month including imitating a model and making a preliminary outline. The author carried out another posttest and made reflections. Through interviews with the subjects, classroom observation and the analysis of the scores of the writing tests, we may draw a conclusion that the students benefit from prewriting activities because these activities provide students with a real need to express and communicate their ideas with others.Implications derived from this research suggest that the teachers should give students more concrete instructions during prewriting activities and help them with English writing and study.