A Research On The Application Of Differentiated Instruction To College English Writing

As the reform of college English teaching has been developed in recent years,people are paying more attention to the learners’ individual elements on theiracademic performance. The traditional “one-size-fits-all” teaching methodneglects the great differences among different learners such as their learning ability,learning styles, methods, interests and acceptance levels of knowledge. In theteaching of college English writing, the individual differences among learnershave great influence on the learning process and result. Therefore, in writingclasses, English teachers should apply different teaching methods based on thedifferences among English learners in order to improve students’ writing skills.Differentiated instruction is the teaching mode in which teachers should facestudents’ individual differences, satisfy students’ individual needs so as to promotethe full development of all the students from their original learning basis. Incollege English writing classes, teaching students according to their differentwriting levels has become an important teaching mode. Taking students’differences into consideration, teachers prepare different teaching objectives,teaching contents, teaching processes and evaluation methods, which helps all thestudents promote their writing ability from their original writing level. Therefore,differentiated instruction is the key to improving English learners’ writing skills.This thesis put forward three research questions:(1) What are students’ individualdifferences? How did the English teacher treat their individual differences beforedifferentiated instruction was carried out? And how did the teacher do during theprocess of the research?(2) When the English teacher applied differentiatedinstruction in college English writing teaching, did writing teaching become asection in college English class instead of being mixed with teaching Englishreading?(3) When differentiated instruction was carried out, could the students in EC improve their English writing ability and skills? Could differentiatedinstruction enhance students’ interest and confidence in English writing? Thethesis focuses on the research mode of differentiated instruction. Teachers applieddifferentiated instruction to college English writing classes and improved students’writing levels gradually. In the process of improving students’ interest in Englishwriting, their confidence in English writing was also enhanced.This study lasted for one semester (16weeks), and the research subjects were85sophomores (Grade2012) who were non-English majors from two classes inShenyang Normal University. From their assignments and scores, we could see thestudents’ writing scores were similar. Before the study, one class (42students) waschosen to be the experimental class (EC), and the other class (43students) was thecontrol class (CC). The English teacher applied differentiated instruction in ECwhile he used traditional teaching method in CC. Questionnaires (Reid’sperceptual learning styles questionnaires in1987, questionnaires of learningconditions and interest in English writing), pretest and posttest of students’ Englishwriting levels (the titles of those compositions were from exam papers of CET4),and interviews were used to collect information and data. Both EC and the CCfollow the same syllabus, and used the same text book (New Horizon CollegeEnglish2, published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press). Theteaching experiment was carried out according to the real situation of the students’English level, with references to the differentiated instruction mode proposed byTomlinson and Tracy Hall. The writing content, writing process and writing resultwere designed according to the students’ present English writing level, learningstyles and their interest in writing. The study followed6steps of differentiatedinstruction: setting differentiated writing goals, applying differentiated teachingmethods, giving differentiated lectures, assigning differentiated writing tasks,carrying on group cooperative learning and adopting multiple means of evaluation.Differentiated teaching mode promoted students’ learning enthusiasm, andenhanced their interest and confidence in English writing.After the teacher applied differentiated instruction for one term, a writing posttest was adopted for85learners in EC and CC. The test results were analyzedby SPSS18.0in order to prove whether there were significant differences betweenthe scores of the two classes before and after the differentiated instruction wasimplemented. The data and the statistical results proved that after the research, thestudents’ scores in EC were higher than the students’ scores in CC. The studentsanswered the questionnaires of English writing situation and interests and some ofthem were interviewed. The data statistics and interview results demonstrated thatdifferentiated instruction increased the students’ interest in English writing andenhanced their confidence in English writing. Finally, the thesis introduced thepedagogical implications of the research for college English teaching, analyzed thelimitations and put forward the suggestions for the related study in the future.