On Effects Of Speaking Activities During The Pre-Writing Period Of An EFL Writing Class

In traditional English writing class, the relationship between speaking andwriting has been neglected. Therefore, the teaching of second language writingproduces very little effect and usually language teachers get half the result with twicethe effort. Most researchers (Raid,1993; Weissberg,1994) indicated that relativelylittle classroom talk was devoted to topic invention and development or to oralrehearsal of potential written text. Thus, speaking activities like prewriting discussionare popular in writing classes. A majority of studies on prewriting discussion suggestthat students write better after talking about a topic (Bossio,1993; Sweigart,1991). InChina, most researchers indicated the potential effects of speaking to writing (MaGuanghui, Wen Qiufang,1999; Pu Xianwei,2009), and some researchers (LiuYong,Wang Qiaoshan,2003) described a potential framework of oral plus writing course inthe practical classroom. Among those who talked about the influence of speaking towriting, most of them just focus on the potential influence of speaking to writing onthe aspect of theoretical discussion but very few of them put the theory into thepractice in Chinese university context. Therefore, further studies are needed to dealwith the problem of how to improve students’ second language writing skillseffectively through practical use of speaking activities in the context of Chineseuniversity.This study takes the advantages of process teaching approach and tries to find theeffectiveness of pre-writing speaking activities such as group talk, story telling, roleplay, etc to college students’ writing ability on the theoretical basis of comprehensibleoutput, cognitive model, and interaction. The study is designed as a comparative studywhich consists of two sophomore college students’ writing classes. We define these two writing classes as control class and experimental class with32subjects in one ofuniversities of Ningxia province. The experimental class adopted speaking activitiesin the pre-writing period while the control class followed the traditional way ofteaching writing which has no speaking interactions at all. The experiment lasts for awhole semester. The data were collected through pre-test and post-test which includequestionnaires, composition test as well as interview. The statistical techniquesemployed for analysis are Paired Sample T-test and Correlation Test of SPSS, version16.0. This study attempts to answer the following questions:(1) What are the functions of speaking activities in the pre-writing period?(2) Are using speaking activities in pre-writing period improve students’ writingability in terms of writing evaluation which include content, organization, discourse,syntax, vocabulary and mechanics of students’ writing product?The results of the questionnaires show that speaking activities in pre-writingperiod are popular and effective. Such of this activities can arise students’ writinginterest and let students make a clear expression of their ideas as well as richen thecontent of their writing; the speaking activities can make students arrange the writingmaterials logically and richen students’ vocabulary but have no effects on students’correct use of grammar. What’s more, from the analysis of the composition test andquestionnaire, we found that students in the experimental class who experience thespeaking activities in the pre-writing period make a great progress in their total scoreof their writing, specifically, in content, organization, discourse and vocabulary butmake no progress in syntax and mechanics of their writing.The pedagogical implications are also presented in this paper, including teacher’srole in the experiential writing classroom; careful arrangement of the classroomactivities; choose a functional topic and task for the students to do the activities.There are several limitations of this study, such as the choice of the subject is notvery perfect, and the amount of the subjects are not large enough to get a generalconclusion of the result which are expected to do further studies.