An Applied Research Of Reading To Write Model On English Writing Instruction

Writing, as one of the basic skills among listening, speaking, reading, and writing, is veryimportant to English learners and it reflects their comprehensive abilities in language use.However, writing has always been the weakness in no matter which stage of English teaching.Specifically, there is still a wide gap between the actual demand of writing and college students’real ability after more than ten years of English study. There are two causes for suchphenomenon: one is that the lack of native language environment increases the difficulty ofEnglish learning; the other is that reading and writing are taught separately in our classroomEnglish teaching, ignoring an important writing source---elegant and native reading materials.Thus, there has grown up an urgent need for a more effective and useful teaching and learningmethod for the problems existing in college English writing.According to modern foreign language teaching approach, language learning is a processthat consists of input (reading, seeing and hearing), intake (processing, memorizing) and output(speaking, writing). Many linguists and experts, such as Krashen, Swain, Ellis, Harmer, havetheir own opinions with different emphasis on such process. Some emphasize input, like Krashen;some stress on output, like Swain; and others integrate input with output, suggesting a balancedway of them, like Harmer. Based on the balanced concept of Reading to Write and some otherrelated research, this study is going to build writing teaching into reading, making the best use ofreading materials and teaching writing through reading. The Reading to Write model was appliedto the Chinese department of some university in Shandong Provence. The subjects involved inthe experiment are130students randomly chosen from two parallel classes. And this empiricalstudy aims to testify whether Reading to Write model is an effective way to improve students’writing ability, then examine students’ attitudes towards Reading to Write, and last construct aconcrete Reading to Write model. The research subjects were divided into experiment group andcontrol group. The former was under guidance of Reading to Write method, while the latter withtraditional one. All the students both from experimental and control class took part in the pre-and post-test and had a questionnaire at the end of the experiment. The data were collected andanalyzed through Paired-Samples T Test, Independent-Samples T Test and tests of statisticalsignificance with SPSS13.0. As what the results have showed, the sores of experiment class(77.05) were higher that that of control class (71.31), and there was a more significant and stableimprovement on writing ability of experimental group. Besides, students in experimental classmade various degrees of progress in vocabulary acquisition, grammar comprehension, discourseawareness and organization, etc. According to the questionnaire, most of the students (81.5%)were satisfied with Reading to Write model, considering it a more effective way to improve writing ability than traditional one.On the whole, Reading to Write model has more positive effect for non-English majors inuniversity. Based on the current conditions, it is an effective way to improve students’ writing bya reasonable and scientific integration of reading with writing. What’s more, it’s a useful way tofoster students’ comprehensive ability in language use and refine college writing instruction.While there are still some limitations, this study has basically reached the expected aims. Theresearcher proposed some suggestions on writing teaching from the perspective of Reading toWrite, with an aim that there would be a positive effect on future studies.