A Study Of Improving Vocational College Students’ English Writing Ability By Integrating English Writing With English Reading

The development of English writing competence is an important but also a difficult issue in English teaching. Thus many teachers cast their focus on finding an effective method to improve the students’ writing competence all the time. The correlation between reading and writing has gained much attention in foreign language teaching in west for a long time. Though the textbooks in China also follow the principle that writing is based on reading, in the real teaching, on one hand, there is no writing class in English teaching, on the other hand, reading and writing are trained as two independent skills in the English teaching in vocational college. This situation makes the students lost their interests in writing and prevents them forming a habit of developing writing competence through reading, which make the students feel hard and incompetent to write. How to improve the students’ writing competence is an important task for the teachers. Based on Krashen’s Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Comprehensible Output Hypothesis, the author reviewed the study of relationship between reading and teaching and put forward a new method for improving the ability of English writing. That is combing writing practices with the teaching of reading in English reading classes.The integration processes are divided into three periods. The first period is information input. In this period, the teacher aims to help the students master the linguistic knowledge and writing skills. The second period is information internalization, in which the teacher asks the students to review and consolidate the knowledge and writing skills by the way of reciting. The third period is information output. In this period, the teacher designs a series of writing practices to develop the students’ writing ability.In order to testify the effect of this method, the author carried out an experiment in two classes in Wuhan Commercial Service College for about four months. In the experiment, the students in experimental group are trained with integration of writing practice with reading activities while the students in control group are taught with the traditional method of the teaching of reading without any writing practices in class. By analyzing the results of the experiment, the author found that the performance of the writing in experimental group were significantly better than those of students in control group. It means that the method of integration of writing with reading can improve students’ writing ability in the real teaching practice.Finally, the author summarizes the thesis, addresses its limitations and makes some suggestions as to the ways of improving the English teaching and in vocational college at the same time.