An Empirical Study On The Application Of Reading-to Write Approach To Senior High(â…¡) English Classes

As is known to all, among the four basic skills, English writing is an indispensable part of English teaching in Senior High School, the significance of which can’t be emphasized too much. However, the situation of English writing of Senior High school students is really depressing. In order to find a way out, many researchers and experts at home and abroad put forward reading-to-write approach and have done a series of relevant researches. However, most of them are targeted at colleges students and few empirical studies focus on Senior High school students. Based on Input Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis, this thesis is intended to explore the two questions from the empirical perspective:(1) What influence can the application of reading-to-write approach in Senior High(II) English classes on students’writing?(2) What attitude do students take towards reading-to-write approach?In this research, two parallel classes were selected as subjects and arranged as the experimental group and the control group. During the one-term experiment, both groups used the same teaching materials, but received reading-to-write approach and traditional approach respectively. Pre-test, post-test and questionnaires were adopted in this research and all the raw data were analyzed with SPSS. The results are as follows:(1) Compared with the scores of pretest, the experimental group have achieved much more progress by 2.3 points in their post test while the controlled group stay almost the same. Additionally, the experiment group have made significant advances in the five aspects of writing, namely, discourse, cohesion, use of new learned vocabulary, complexity and accuracy in their compositions. This shows that reading-to-write is an effective approach to improving students’writing competence.(2) The statistics of the questionnaire show that the majority of the students, accounting for 90%, take a positive attitude toward reading-to-write approach, believing that it strengthens their confidence in writing, thus reducing their anxiety.The implications for senior high school English writing are that reading and writing should be naturally integrated instead of being separated in classroom instruction. Furthermore, teachers are expected to fully utilize teaching materials and provide students with enough comprehensible input so as to build scaffolds for their English writing.