Inquiring Into The Teaching Of High School English Writing From The Perspective Of Rhetoric

English writing is an important productive skill in language use. To some extent, English writing shows the writer’s linguistic competence, especially her communication ability. Right now, however, not enough attention has been paid to the senior high English writing, and our high school students’ English writing skill is comparatively poor. Today, the teaching of English writing in China remains fixated on enhancing the students’ correct use of language, directing attention only to such linguistic elements as words, sentence patterns and grammar. Very often, we still ignore the communication goal of English writing. In response to such a situation, this thesis undertakes to discuss the teaching of senior high English writing from the perspective of western rhetoric. In this paper, we analyze the current teaching of English writing first. Then in order to search for an effective way to improve the writing situation, we introduce western rhetoric as a new remedy for the existing problems, arguing that a rhetoric-centered methodology holds much promise in our effort to break free from the dominant grammar-dominant model. The discussion is followed by an experiment in teaching conducted to verify the effect on the students’ competence in written communication by cultivating their sense of rhetoric, especially the sense of audience and of the ultimate goal for writing.