A Study On Improving Students’ English Writing Ability Through English Newspaper Reading In Senior High School

Writing, which is one of the four basic skills, is considered as anindispensable part of English learning and remains a weak part in Englishteaching in senior high middle school. It is an important time to learn Englishwell in senior high school, for it plays an essential role in education andemployment. As is known to us, listening, speaking and reading are the basisof writing in the four skills, meanwhile, writing can represent the integratedEnglish ability. Nowadays, the writing ability of the students is weak and thestudents can not express themselves correctly and freely, which has becomeone of the most difficult problems facing in English writing. In order tochange this situation, many English researchers conducted a lot ofexperiments from the theoretical and pedagogic aspect and I also do someresearch towards this problem.A study which is to improve English writing ability by Englishnewspaper reading is put forward aiming at solving the present problem. It ismotivated with second language acquisition theories, among which areKrashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’s out Hypothesis. The former stressesthe crucial role of a large amount of comprehensible input while the latteradvocates the driving force of comprehensible output in pushing learners’development of productive skills.The thesis is designed with an experiment, and it analyzed how todevelop the students’ writing ability through English newspaper reading. Thesubjects were90students of two classes in senior-one in HangTian MiddleSchool, one class is the experimental class, and the other is the controlledclass. The time of experiment is from September,2010to January,2011and itmainly developed with the following three questions:(1) Can Englishnewspaper reading arouse the students’ writing interest?(2) Can Englishnewspaper reading enrich the students’ productive vocabulary?(3) CanEnglish newspaper reading enhance the students’ ability in textual organization? The students in the experimental class were asked to complete aquestionnaire, conduct interviews, writing tests and so on to analyze the resultof the experiment.After the experiment, we drew the conclusion:(1) The students in theexperimental class are interested in writing after ENR activities;(2) Thevocabulary has enriched after ENR activities and they’d like to accumulatevocabulary more positively;(3) The ENR activities raised the students’awareness of discourse and they can use some conjunctions to make thewhole passage more rational and logical. The results of the T-test reveal thatthe students in the experiment outperformed than those in the controlled class.The research results have great influence on the teaching of both Englishreading and writing in senior high school: First, the students have theopportunity to contact real English by reading English newspaper andaccumulate vocabulary and English expressions, which is an acceptablelanguage input for students; Second, it is an effective way to develop Englishwriting ability combining reading with writing, for those articles are variousin styles, contents and opinions, which provide a large quantity of materialsfor their writing, and they are not afraid to write; Third, since it is veryeffective for students to improve the students’ reading and writing, it is worthfurther promotion.