A Study Of The Application Of CBI In Senior English Writing Teaching

In recent ten years, the reform of the new senior English curriculum has been deepening constantly and has been improving gradually. As the New Curriculum Standard for Senior English states, the overall aim of English curriculum is to cultivate students’ overall language proficiency, and writing is the main part of it. However, writing has been a weak link in senior English teaching for a long time. Although the traditional teaching methods of writing, such as the product approach and the process approach and so on, can make some students get good marks in writing, these teaching methods mainly focus on the forms, such as the grammatical normalization in language and the correctness in spelling, and they ignore the enrichment of the content and the reasonableness of the discourse structures. So it has some shortcomings in strengthening students’motivation and interest in writing and effectively improving students’overall writing levels.Based on the deficiency of the previous studies, the thesis proposes that a new teaching method, Content-Based Instruction, should be applied to English writing teaching so as to substitute the traditional teaching methods. The new teaching method is more suitable for the teaching of Yilin version of Oxford Senior English textbooks, which are based on unit topics. Meanwhile, it is in accordance with the scoring criteria of the English compositions in the College Entrance Examination, whose dominant part is the contents. This kind of the teaching method based on contents is not only beneficial to developing students’language skills, but also helps students to gain new meaningful knowledge.The author attempted to solve two questions through the experiment. The first one is whether students’English writing motivation and interest can be strengthened by applying CBI to English writing. The second one is whether CBI can improve students’English writing ability effectively and how to improve it. For this reason, in this study, the author conducted a4-month experimental research among75Senior Two students from Class9and Class11in Zhuzhou No.4Middle School. During the experiment, the students of the experimental class were taught with CBI, while the students of the control class were taught with the product approach. The author used many kinds of instruments in the research, such as giving a lecture, conducting questionnaire surveys, pre-test and post-test in the class. From the data analyses and discussions, the results show that students’ English writing motivation and interest can be strengthened by applying CBI to English writing. Compared with the traditional product approach, CBI can improve students’writing ability more effectively. Therefore, based on CBI, the empirical study of senior English writing teaching surmounts the difficult point in teaching, and meanwhile it can make up for a lack of the empirical studies on CBI at home. In the further senior English writing teaching, CBI, which can be effective to help students to improve their English writing level, is a new writing teaching method which is worth popularizing.