A Case Study Of The Effectiveness Of The Process-Oriented Approach On The College Science And Engineering Students’ English Writing

The writing, as one of the most significant research fields of the Second LanguageAcquisition, has always been the focus of researchers and scholars. And since theimplementation of the National College English Test Band Four and Band Six, the writing hasalways been the weakness. Even if the students’ general English proficiency and test scores haveimproved distinctly, their English writing competence and scores suspended. For a15point fullmark’s composition, the average score could be less than9point which is lower than thepass-mark, and this is far from the expectation in the syllabus. The immergence of all theseproblems led to the high attention and serious introspection of many scholars and experts. Howto improve our traditional college English writing teaching has been the urgent affairs.In1976, based on the shortcomings of the traditional teaching method, Zamel put forwardthe process-oriented approach and elaborated its numerous strong points compared to thetraditional product-oriented approach. This study applied the process approach into the collegescience and engineering English writing classroom, collected the relevant data through casestudy, adopted combined research method of both quantitative and qualitative analysis to verifywhether the process approach is more efficient than the product approach in improving thecollege science and engineering students’ English writing performance. The main researchquestions are as followed:(1) Can the process approach improve the English writing competence of the Chinese collegescience and engineering majors?(2) Can the process approach improve the English writing competence of the Chinese collegescience and engineering majors more effectively than the product approach?(3) To what degree the process approach affect the English writing of the Chinese collegescience and engineering majors? Can the process approach benefit all the good, the mediated,and the poor student writers?The24subjects of this experiment are from two classes in Ships and Turbine EngineeringDepartment in Wuhan Technical College of Communications. During the eighteen weeks’experiment, the experiment group assumed the process approach, while the control groupassumed the traditional product approach. The obtained results under the SPSS13.0analysisshows:1) In the pre-test, the comparison of the scores and the sums of the errors numbersbetween the two groups shows no significant difference, while in the post-test, the effects of theexperiment is noticeable better than those in the control group.2) The high and the mediatedlevels in the experiment group and the low level in the control group improved moresignificantly than their counterparts.3) Among the six error types, except for the grammar error,the correction rates in the experiment group are higher than those in the control group in otherfive types.This study is aimed at the college English teachers’ better understanding and the applicationof the process approach in the daily English writing practice. Due to the inevitable fact that every approach has its merits and demerits, in the practical application, combined with the students’specific actual situations, the teachers should ceaselessly explore the better method to improvetheir writing competences and the overall language learning abilities.