Application Of Data-driven Learning In Senior High School’s English Writing Class

English writing is a core skill for its learners, on which the teaching of foreign languagein our country has laid stress for a long time. Among the four basic skills, writing is the mostdifficult one to master. For a long period, teaching of writing is relatively a weak link of thewhole English teaching process. Trace it to its source, the traditional teaching approachmerely focus on the teacher and don’t give full play to the students’ subjective initiative andcannot provide sufficient and useful language inputs, so that the teaching effect of Englishwriting class is not satisfactory.In1991, based on corpus, Tim Johns put forward a new approach for ESL teaching andlearning, namely, data-driven learning. In recent years, there has been an increasing trend inapplying data-driven learning approach to the field of second language teaching and research.But domestic related researches are mostly restricted to the field of English vocabularyteaching whereas related researches in the field of English writing are rather limited.Therefore, the present research is expected to fill in the blank in this field. The purpose of thisresearch is to combine data-driven learning with the traditional teaching approach in Englishwriting class so as to improve the students’ writing abilities as well as the quality of Englishwriting class and meanwhile hopes to provide some enlightenment for the further researchesof English writing teaching in senior high school.This paper based on Constructivism and Input Theory, adopts the experimental methodand combines quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis, uses questionnaire, pre-test paper,post-test paper and face-to-face interview as research tools and takes102senior two studentsof Dalian No.20senior high school as subject, in order to study the feasibility of applyingDDL approach in senior high school’s English writing class. It is designed to answer thefollowing three questions：1) Can DDL approach raise the learners’ interests in Englishwriting and cultivate their autonomous learning abilities?2) Can DDL approach help learnersimprove their abilities of English writing?3) What are the limitations of DDL approach whenit is applied to Senior High School’s English writing class? And how to improve it.The experiment results clearly show that data-driven learning approach can improve thestudents’ English writing abilities as well as stimulate their learning interests, cultivates theirautonomous learning abilities. In addition, it should be pointed out that data-driven learningapproach is a whole new way of foreign language teaching and learning, there are somelimitations we should not ignore, such as the difficult level of corpus material, requirementsfor computer equipments and computer ability. It is suggested that teachers should select the proper materials from the corpus according to the teaching aims and design the teachingcontents carefully so as to make better use of this approach and improve the teaching qualityof English writing class effectively.