| Using English to communicate is the ultimate goal of English learning. There are two ways to communicate, oral and written, which are naturally the two forms to test students’ability to communicate. At present, most English tests adopt the form of writing to test the examinees’writing ability. Recently, the writing tasks in the English test for college entrance examination are prompted by either pictures or key words. But no one has investigated whether students’writing performance via these two kinds of writing task prompt is related to their thinking styles. Therefore, this research begins with the analysis of the thinking styles with the purpose to investigate the interactive effects of thinking style and writing task prompt on Senior high school students’ writing performance.In this study, the students’ writing performance includes the writing score, the linguistic features (fluency, accuracy) and the main contents of their writing samples. By way of getting 45 students to finish the writing tasks and the questionnaire of thinking styles, analyzing the experimental data with SPSS 19.0, the results are analyzed and summarized as follows:(1) In terms of picture- or key -word- prompt writing tasks, external style will have a positive influence on students’total number of words.(2) In terms of different writing task prompts, oligarchic, hierarchic and liberal styles have little influence on students’writing content, while this kind of influence does not influence significantly on students’ writing score.(3) As for picture- or key-word-prompt writing task, executive style has a negative influence on students’writing score.That is to say, different writing task prompts have few influences on students’ writing performance, which to some degree validates the validity of the writing tasks prompted by either pictures or key words. But internal and executive styles do have a certain influence on students’writing performance. |
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