An Empirical Study On Technique-based Writing And Practice-based Writing In College English Teaching

As a productive skill, the importance of writing has been widely paid attention to. Although in China English writing remains a weak point in English teaching and in many CET4/CET6, the scores got by most testees are5to8in writing (the full mark:15). Students’writing ability has a long distance to what is required in College English Curriculum Requirements (Yang Penzhen,2006).The development of writing ability has been an indispensable part in both English teaching and learning. And English writing plays an important role in developing the students’ comprehensive abilities in language communication. The aim of English writing teaching is to improve students’English writing ability and next improve their overall English ability. But how to improve students’writing ability is the key and difficult point in researching English writing teaching. This paper discusses two writing models:Technique-based Writing Model and Practice-based Writing Model by making a comparison between these two by means of classroom experiment. The experiment is expected to answer the following three questions:1) Which model is more effective in improving college students’overall writing performance?2) In what aspects can these two approaches improve students’writing ability?3) What are the pedagogical implications that can be drawn from the experiment with these two approaches to the teaching of writing? There are75sophomore subjects from Lijiang College, Guangxi Normal University involved in this experiment. Two classes are selected from social work major. The experiment lasts14weeks, and in every other week, the students take2writing classes and every class lasts40minutes. The students are asked to take a pretest and a posttest. All the quantitative data are collected and analyzed through the T-test and paired sample test by the computer software SPSS17.0to compare the changes of students’ writing performance before and after the experiment.The statistical results show:1) Both of the two models can improve students’holistic writing ability.2) Comparatively speaking, the Practice-based Model is more effective than the Technique-based Model in developing the students’ writing in the content dimension, while the Technique-based Model is more helpful than the Practice-based Model in promoting the students’ writing in the organization dimension.3) Concerning the students in CG, the Technique-based Model helps to promote the students’ English writing in the dimensions of organization, language use, and writing mechanics, but exerts no impact on the students’ use of vocabulary, and negative impact on their writing in the content dimension.4) Concerning the students in EG, the Practice-based Writing is effective to help with the students’ English writing in content and language use, but shows no effect in the students’use of vocabulary and writing mechanics, and negative impact on their writing in the organization dimension.Then some constructive suggestions to writing teachers are put forward. The limitations of the present study and the suggestions for further studies are also elaborated at the end of this thesis.