| As one of the four basic skills that a language learner must acquire during hislanguage study, writing plays an important role in language output and dailycommunication. The New Curriculum Standard for High School English (the "NewCurriculum") issued by the Ministry of Education in the year2003describes that theEnglish language abilities which should be acquired by a high school student in hisEnglish learning as follows:1) The ability to write a summary or a report according tothe relevant reading material;2) The ability to write a short passage or a report byusing the information from charts or texts;3) The ability to write a passage with acoherent semantic and structural integrity, and so on. Since2007, Task-based Writingitem has been added to the NMET (National Matriculation English Test) inGuangdong Province. This kind of writing item fully reflects and meets therequirement of the "New Curriculum". During the writing teaching in the high school,the author of this thesis found that a lot of students are unable to get desired andsatisfactory marks in Task-based Writing item. What they have written is unstructuredand organized loosely, without proper interface between the sentences. They couldhardly express their ideas in a clear and consistent way or present the informationclearly and logically. The reason may be that most of our teachers still adopt thetraditional approaches for teaching writing in high schools. It is obvious that thetraditional writing teaching approaches fail to solve such problems that students ownin their writing. Among these traditional approaches, the aspects of lexicon and syntaxare overemphasized, students’ understanding of the genre and input of language areoften ignored. Teachers should pay attention not only to students’ sentenceorganizing but also the communication skills and the awareness of discourse.Discourse analysis theories bring new entry points to the writing teaching so thatthe writing problems at discourse level can be easily solved because “discourseanalysis pays particular attention to the ways that language in context is organized atand above the level of the Sentence’’ as Barton (2002) states．The aim of study indiscourse analysis is the structure and function of language in use，therefore, concepts such as discourse types，discourse patterns, cohesion and coherence in the theory mayprovide some enlightenments to writing teaching. Such kind of teaching is likely to bethe important part in students’ writing capacity．Noticing the writing deficiency of students at discourse level, the authorproposes a discourse analysis-based teaching method for writing teaching. Thismethod’s aim is to apply the discourse analysis theories to the practice of writingteaching．And it is also designed to fit the situation and to facilitate the writingcapacity for high school students．Some theories of discourse analysis relevant towriting teaching are adapted and applied to the method. This makes it create greatercontribution to the students’ writing capacity at discourse and own more advantagesthan the traditional writing teaching approaches, such as Product approach, Processapproach and Genre approach．In this research, an experimental study is conducted so as to test the effects of theteaching method．The participants are the students from Guangzhou High School ofFine Arts. They have participated as subjects in the experiment, who come from twoclass, and one class act as an experimental group(EG)and the other as a controlgroup(CG)．In the condition that the relevant independent variables are controlled, theauthor adopts different teaching approaches in EG and CG to carry out Englishwriting instruction．The discourse analysis-based teaching method is employed in theexperimental group while the traditional approach is used in the control group，in theprocess of the experiment, two writing tests respectively serving as the pretest andposttest are carried out．The data are input into computers and SPSS is used to processthem. The results of the empirical study shows that the teaching model is moreeffective in improving the students’ writing competence compared with the traditionalwriting approach．... |
PDF Full Text Request