The Application Of The Process Approach To English Writing Teaching In A Technical School

In recent years, more and more teachers have realized the important role of writing in English language teaching. The trend seems to have been reinforced by the new writing objectives in the newly promulgated Technical school, secondary vocational school and senior school’s curriculum criteria and new marking criteria of NMET. Yet, despite the strenuous efforts made by teachers and students, English writing is still the most challenging and threatening course for most students. One major factor accounting for this fact is that our teaching practice still falls back on the traditional approach. Such practice seems to have ignored cognitive factors of the writing process. The writing process is recursive and non-linear. While writing, students exhibit a variety of behaviors such as pre-writing, drafting, reviewing, revising and editing.The major concern of the present thesis is to explore and apply a process-oriented approach to teaching writing that may be suitable for Chinese technical schools and to verify its effectiveness and feasibility. The study attempts to answer the following research questions:1) Can the application of process approach improve technical school students’ writing scores?2) Can the application of process approach influence students’ writing confidence, interest, attitude, motivation, writing habit and method?The subjects are84students in senior two from a secondary technical school in Guangdong Province. During four months’ instructional intervention, the teacher carried out the process approach to teaching writing in the experimental class. Three instruments were used in the research:two questionnaires related to writing confidence, interest, attitude, motivation, writing habit and method; scores of pre-test and post-test; interview. By analyzing the collected data, the research finds:1) after the experiment the students in the experimental class have improved their English writing performance a lot; They felt more confident in writing than before. They gained interest in writing and welcomed this new approach to teaching writing. Their attitudes and beliefs towards writing changed dramatically. The main enlightenment which is given by this research is that the process approach is suitable for English writing teaching in technical schools, and it is more effective than the product writing teaching method in improving students’ writing scores.It is hoped that this thesis will help the Chinese secondary technical school or secondary vocational school English teachers to have a better understanding of the process writing and more and more teachers can apply this approach to their own teaching practice.