Application Of Network-assisted Process Approach To Teaching College English Writing

English writing is a basic language skill, yet a headache in foreign language teaching.Teaching English writing is self-evidently to develop students’ English writing ability. Fromthe cognitive and social view towards writing ability, this study interprets writing as a creativeexpression process, recursive cognition process, and social interaction process, rather thansimply an ended product (i.e. words on a page) or an activity of solitary individuals.In view of inadequate practice of writing in College EFL Teaching, particularly fornon-English majors, a network-assisted process approach is applied to teaching Englishwriting. Specific research questions go as follows.1) Would this model be more effective thanthe traditional product approach in improving students’ writing ability?2) Is peer feedbackfeasible in the Network-assisted process approach?3) What is student’s view towardsprocess-oriented writing teaching based on the Network?This study is based on teaching experiment, with text analysis, questionnaire andinterview as auxiliary research methods. Before the experiment,116non-English majorundergraduate students of grade2012from Northwest A&F University are chosen as researchsubjects. They are freshmen from two natural English classes,58students in each. The twoclasses are randomly designated as experimental class (EC) and control class (CC) in thisstudy after pre-test confirmed no significant difference between them in English writingcompetence and in overall English proficiency. During the16-week experiment, EC is treatedwith the intended process-oriented online teaching approach, while CC traditional productsapproach. After the experiment, the experimental class answers the questionnaire; both classestake posttest; eight students from EC are chosen accidentally for interview; and each of the8students’1st draft,2nd draft, and received feedback regarding his1st draft are put side by sidefor text analysis.Regarding the scores in pretest and posttest, SPSS16.0is used to analyze the mean score.Result shows experimental class significantly surpasses the control class in the mean ofEnglish writing in posttest, while no significant difference between them in pretest in Englishwriting and in comprehensive English. This finding suggests the network-assisted processapproach is more effective than the traditional product approach in improving students’ writing ability.The text analysis finds a high quality of peer feedback, with84%feedback pointsrational. Peer feedback not only exists at language points, but also reflected in contents,organization and structure. Most of the peer feedback points are incorporated into2nddraftand are generally utilized effectively.Questionnaire and interview find that the network-assisted process approach to teachingEFL writing is generally thought to have developed their interest, sense of audience andcompetence in writing, and win approval by most students. The positive effect of peer andteacher feedback is confirmed too from the questionnaire.In short, the study suggests the network-assisted process approach is feasible in teachingcollege English writing and is conducive to the development of English writing ability.Through this teaching approach, students’ writing competence has improved; studentsgenerally are in favor of the approach; peer and teacher feedback in the process approachshow positive impact on student’s revision; high quality of peer feedback, satisfactoryincorporation rate of peer feedback, and successful incorporation of peer feedback intorewriting all suggest the feasibility and assistance of peer feedback; and peer feedback is notconfined to the language level, also reflected in content, organization and structure. All thesehave certain pedagogical implication to college English writing teaching.