An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Collaborative Output On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Ability

As a productive practice, writing embodies students’ comprehensive skills of usinglanguage. However, in China, the teaching is conducted in large classes, it is always difficultfor teachers to revise the students’ writing face to face. And for years, there exists aphenomenon that input overweighs output in English writing teaching of senior high school. Asa result, the students’writing performance is not satisfactory. After the collaborative learning isintroduced to China, it has been considered to be a new trend in English teaching, since pairwork or group work may offer more opportunities for students to use English. The thesisconducts an empirical study, aiming to explore the effects of collaborative output as a task ofcollaborative learning on English writing in senior high school. It tries to answer the followingthree research questions:1) Can collaborative output work in senior high school students’ writing performance inChina?2) Does the experimental group improve their writing in the three aspects: language, contentand structure?3) Have the students’ writing interests and attitudes towards writing been changedsignificantly after adopting the collaborative output?The study was carried out in a senior high school in Xinzhou, Shanxi Province. Subjectswere60senior high school students from two first year classes, and they were divided into twogroups: experimental group and control group. Six steps were involved in the experiment: apilot study, a pre-experiment questionnaire, a pretest, a treatment, a posttest and apost-experiment questionnaire. All the subjects were asked to complete a writing task alonewhen the experiment began and ended. During the treatment, the subjects of experimentalgroup were required to complete six writing tasks collaboratively while the subjects of controlgroup complete the six writing tasks alone. Finally, a questionnaire was assigned to thesubjects of experimental group. The study lasted for almost one semester. What’s more, thedata was analyzed by SPSS19.0.Research findings show that:1) Collaborative output has a positive impact on senior high school students’ writing performance: on condition that there is no significant difference of the pretest, the mean score ofcontrol group (M=11.4667) is lower than that of experimental group (M=15.0000) and thesignificance value is lower than level0.05in posttest.2) The thesis is based on the English score standard of the College Entrance Examination.In the three aspects of language, content and structure, the mean scores of experimental group inposttest are all higher than the pretest (respectively are:4.1333>3.0667,7.2333>5.0667,3.6333>2.8667) and the significance values are lower than level0.05in all the three aspects.3) After the training of collaborative output,96.6%students become interested in Englishwriting and73.3%students feel they become active and initiative in English writing.