An Empirical Study Of The Application Of Reading-to-write Approach In College English Writing Teaching

Writing, as a sort of output language skill, is an indispensable component in college English teaching. From the perspective of SLA, the mastery of writing, admittedly, will symbolize students? general language competence as a whole. However, in the domestic college English classrooms the teaching of writing has been “time-consuming and inefficient”(Gao Shangkun,1999; Dai Weidong,2001; Zhou Yan,2010) for a long time.Based on Krashen?s comprehensible input hypothesis and Swain?s output hypothesis, the present research attempts to analyze the status quo in current college English writing teaching, and speculatively adopts the integrated writing method of Reading-to-Write Approach(RWA) which endeavors to enhance college students? English writing ability.The present research attempts to compare the teaching effects of English writing between control group and experiment group in an empirical study, and the research questions thereby are: 1) Can the application of Reading-to-Write Approach enhance college English students? writing performance? 2) Compared with the traditional method of teaching English writing what merits can be brought about for the students by adopting RWA?Two classes, experimental class and control class, were involved in the study with the population size of each about 50. RWA is applied in experimental class while traditional method is used in control class. The explanation of RWA and its method are provided to the subjects in the experiment. An instructional plan of teaching English writing by RWA is made for 10 lessons in 10 weeks. The research instruments adopted are a pre-test, a post-test and an interview. SPSS 18.0 was used for data analysis. Two results are obtained: 1) RWA, to some extent, can help enhance students? English writing competence by raising their scores; 2) Compared with the traditional teaching method, RWA turns out to be helpful for enriching students vocabulary and sentence variety in writing, and improving their ability of expressing and organizing ideas.