Enhancing Students’ Writing Ability Through Divergent Thinking Tasks At Junior Middle School

The task of junior middle school English teaching is to enable the students to master some basic English, improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, develop their integrating skills of using English as well as train their observation, memory, thinking, imagination ability and creative spirit. Listening, speaking, reading and writing skills are the four basic skills of language learning. While writing plays an important and indispensable role among the four. Writing involves students in language use, which enhances students’ thinking. The aim of the English writing teaching is to train the students’ ability of using the target language to express what they have observed, what they are thinking in their mind, to improve their abilities of using the written English. The procedure of Junior English writing training is a gradual, continuous course. How to improve the students’ real ability of writing? The key is to help the students to learn more English,enlarge their knowledge of English, help the students learn to use English fluently and naturally.How can they use the English fluently? Developing the students’ creative thinking ability is the most important.Divergent thinking was definitely proposed by Guilford(1967)when he proposed "divergent production" as one of the basic creativity-relevant mental operations in his structure-of-intellect (SOI) model. In1985, Guilford (1985) further perfected the definition of divergent thinking as "producing a number of alternative items of information from memory storage, either verbatim or in modified form, to satisfy a given need". Since divergent thinking is the core of creative thinking, so how to improve the students’ writing skills through the divergent thinking tasks is worth considering. Therefore, as junior middle school teachers, we should try to enhance the students’ writing ability through divergent thinking tasks.Divergent thinking is the core of creative thinking, and writing ability is the embody of the language, we can promote students’ linguistic creativity and writing ability through divergent thinking tasks.The hypothesis formed in this study is that students’ writing ability can be enhanced through divergent thinking tasks. I made a study on how to enhance the students’writing ability through divergent thinking tasks at word, phrase and sentence levels. Through theoretical analysis, comparative teaching experiment and classroom observation, this research attends to explore whether we could enhance children’s English writing ability through performing divergent thinking tasks, how to design divergent thinking tasks with the given textbook; what is the teaching model of the divergent writing class.Through the research our hypothesis was confirmed that students’ writing ability can be enhanced through divergent thinking tasks;...