An Empirical Study On Process Approach Applied To English Writing Teaching In Middle School

The teaching has not been given proper attention to during the course of Englishteaching. The monotony of English class, lack of guidance coupled with the ignorance ofstudents’ writing purpose and the cultivation of interest account for students’ poorperformance in English writing.With the deepening of English teaching revolution, process approach has graduallybeen introduced to English class in middle school. It remains an endless argument overthe process approach and product approach. The study aims to introduce processapproach to both junior high school and senior high school and divide students into3categories: good, average and inferior according to their English competence to try tocompare the effects of process approach with product approach to English writing appliedto students in the some grade and to students in junior high school and senior high schooland prove whether applying process approach mobilizes students’ enthusiasm greatly andinspires their interests in English writing.The subjects were108junior two students and112senior two students. Threeinstruments has been employed in the research: two questionnaires (one at the beginning,the other at the end of the experiment) related to writing confidence, attitudes andmotivation of English writing, interview, and scores of two compositions (one is thepre-test and the other is post-test).The experiment lasted four months and consisted of three stages. The teachingmethod used in the control class will be product approach, while in the experimental class;the teacher will apply the process approach.The figures acquired from the final score of students, questionnaires and interviewshow that both process approach and product approach help to improve the final score ofEnglish writing. The function of process approach has been best displayed to averagesenior students and good junior students. Product approach helps good senior studentsand average and inferior junior students make big progress. Neither approach has madean obvious difference to senior inferior students.Based on the above conclusion, it is suggested that it’s necessary to combine the strong points of both approaches that is to add preparatory activities in traditional productapproach to develop students’mindset, to change free writing into guided writing and addmodel articles appreciation and recitation at the end of process approach to get acomprehensive method for better teaching effects.