The Research On Improving Junior High School Students’Writing Competence Using Process Writing Approach

For a long period, English writing has been assumed as the weakest link in teaching in junior middle school in China. How to improve English writing teaching has become one of the heated topics of today. However, most instruction of English writing in the middle school still falls back on the traditional product writing approach. This type of teaching method ignores the skills, knowledge, emotional sides, writing strategies, and cultural cognition which happens during the process of writing, but only emphasizes the final product of students’ writing and grammatical accuracy is of its importance. It is certain that students’ English writing ability is far from satisfactory. As a result, many students are gradually losing their interest and confidence in English writing.In order to improve students’ writing ability, the author applied process approach to writing teaching practice, trying to deal with the following existing problems:1. Can the Process Writing Approach improve the students’ confidence of writing?2. Can the Process Writing Approach improve the students’writing proficiency?The research intended to formulate a new teaching mode to enhance students’ writing competence through experiments and questionnaires. In the experiment, the students were selected from two natural classes of a middle school in Beijing.35students were chosen respectively for the experimental and control classes. In the experimental class, the teacher instructs students how to make use of the Process Writing Approach. While in the control class, the teacher goes on teaching without doing any process writing instructions for the students.The research consists of two stages, which are the preparation period and the actualization of the action research. During the first period, the researcher prepared the materials needed for the action research and two questionnaires were delivered to the research subjects, mainly to find what problems the students via the first questionnaire and to know their attitude towards writing from the other questionnaire. At the beginning of the second period, the students took part in the examination organized by the school at the beginning of this term. The researcher collected the students’ papers and analyzed their writing. Then the action research was carried out according to the schedule. At the end of the second period, the students took part in the exam which is designed to prepare them well for the coming NMET. Then Questionnaire Two was designed to the students again and the interview was carried out.There are altogether five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is the introduction. The second chapter offers the theoretic basis for the action research, including the theory on writing, especially on product and process writing, and group work. The third chapter focuses on the action research itself. In the fourth chapter, the data collected from the questionnaires, the interview and the tests are shown and discussed. Through the analyses of all the data, the three hypotheses are confirmed. The fifth chapter covers the major findings and implications of the research. The researcher also points out some limitations of the action research and gives some suggestions on further research in Chapter Five.The findings of the present study have demonstrated that the process approach can improve the writing confidence of the students. Moreover, students’comprehensive English proficiency and interest in English learning were also improved. Accordingly, if teachers exercise daily the teaching mode appropriately in their writing activities in their teaching tasks, it can not only make students interested in English writing, but also improve to their English writing abilities as well.