A Comparative Study Of Process Approach And Product Approach To Improving Senior High School Students’ English Writing Ability

Writing is one of the four basic language skills, and it can objectively reflect the students’ comprehensive abilities of their language application. Cultivating students’ writing skills can effectively internalize their language knowledge and improve thir comprehensive skills in the application of foreign language.Because of the high demand of writing ability in the new English Curriculum Standards in Senior High School, the proportion and difficulty of the English writing in NMET is gradually increased, and the training of writing ability is emphasized more. However, the senior high school students’writing ability is far from being satisfactory. To change this situation, teachers in senior high middle school have to shoulder heavy teaching tasks, but no obvious improvements seem to be made. This has brought to our awareness that better teaching methods have to be explored to improve the teaching effect of English writing in senior high school.In order to find out the effectiveness of product approach and process approach in the improvement of students’writing ability, the writer carries out a four-month experiment in two parallel classes, Class15and Class16of Grade2in Tangshan No.2Senior High School. Meanwhile, the writer observes and analyzes the changes of lexical richness in students’ composition of pre-and post-writing tests.This research, by employing quantitative and qualitative methods, compares the effects of product approach applied in the control class and the process approach applied in the experiment class. After the experiment, the writer compares the results from the pre-and post-writing tests. Also, two questionnaires are adopted to study the changes of the students’attitude towards the two writing approaches before and after the experiment.The results show that compared to product approach, process approach has more positive effect on the improvement of students’ writing ability,and can improve effectively the students’writing interests and writing levels. Process approach provides the space and environment to stimulate the students’creative and logical thinking, and it fosters the students’ ability of self study.