A Study On The Effectiveness Of “Reading-to-Write” On English Writing Teaching In Vocational Colleges

With the development of education reform, vocational education is booming recently. English teaching and related reform also gain the attention of vocational colleges. English writing ability, as an important language output skill, is the most direct and real way to reflect students’ English level and ability. Syllabus of English Course in Vocational College sets clear requirement to improve students’ practical English writing ability. However, in teaching practice, the author found facing writing the students in vocational colleges “have nothing to say” and “don’t know how to say”. In order to better the situation and improve the writing ability of students in vocational colleges, the author puts forward the “reading-to-write” teaching mode under the guidance of Memetics and tests its effectiveness by empirical research.Three questions will be addressed in this study:1. What kind of difficulty do the students in vocational colleges face in English writing?2. Is the “reading-to-write” under Memetics effective in improving students’ Englishwriting?3. What do students think about the effectiveness of the methodology “reading-to-write”?One vocational college in Baoji serves as the research object of the study and a total of 248 out of 300 questionnaires are available. Through the statistical analysis, the author found the main problem that the students face in English writing is they are lacking of writing materials and poor in expressing skills. Based on this, the author designs the “reading-to-write” mode under the guidance of Memetics, namely: Inputting by Reading —Analysis(Memes Extracting)—Reciting and Memorizing(Memes Copying and Absorbing)—Writing(Memes Outputting)—Revising(Memes Interacting). To test the effectiveness of the teaching mode, 90 students from two parallel classes of the medical branch in the Vocational Technology College participate in the research. One half of students belong to experimental class who are taught by “reading-to-write”, the other is the controlled class experiencing traditional way of teaching(The Product Approach). Owing to the experiment research, pretest, teaching experiment and post-test are arranged chronologically. At the same time, a combination of machine and artificial grading system is adopted to collect and sort out data, later SPSS17.0 is applied as the research instrument to compare and analyze the experimental data. In order to acquire a full and reliable insight of the teaching effect, individual interviews are organized to investigate students’ intuitive attitude toward the mode.The results of the experiment indicate that “reading-to-write” mode under Memetics is effective in improving the English writing ability of the students in vocational technology colleges. This method is effective in helping students standardize their writing format, improving their skills of expressing; and it is especially effective in improving students’ ability of organizing ideas logically and arranging writing materials. The students in experimental class think highly of the teaching mode. In a word, “reading-to-write” is workable; it can provide matching solutions for the difficulty that students in vocational colleges face in English writing and improve students’ writing ability effectively. Therefore, it is worthy of reference among other vocational colleges to some extent.