An Empirical Study Of Secondary-level Reading-based EFL Writing Instruction

Reading and writing are two important components of English teaching. As an important source of language input, reading is a vital approach for students to acquire vocabulary, language structure, functional knowledge, skills and so on. Writing, on the other hand, is an important way of language output, which is also a manifestation of student’s integrated language ability. Reading and writing, as basic skills of language, are closely connected and mutually complementary, reinforcing each other.The new reformation of English teaching in English Curriculum Standards(Ministry of Education, 2003) and The New Curriculum Criterion for English Education of Jiangsu Province(2014) have made new requirements on senior high school students’ writing ability. However, there is still a wide gap between the actual demand of writing competence and senior high students’ real ability after years of English study. The close relation between reading and writing has long been ignored and senior high school teachers spend little time teaching writing, both of which lead to the fact that students show little interest in writing. Therefore, there has been an urgent need for a more effective and useful approach for the teaching of EFL writing in order to deal with the problems existing in English writing in senior high school. Many studies have been done on improving writing through guided reading both at home and abroad, but most of them are limited to advanced level learners. Few such empirical studies focus on how senior high school students improve writing.Therefore, based on relevant research and related theories, namely, Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis, and Schema Theory, the author tries to integrate reading and writing in classroom teaching, and makes an empirical study on 63 students in Grade Three of The High School Affiliated to Soochow University, trying to explore how reading-based writing instruction affects students in terms of writing in senior high school.The specific research questions go as follows:1. To what extent can the reading-based EFL writing instruction improve Chinese senior high school students’ writing proficiency?2. To what extent can the reading-based EFL writing instruction change Chinese senior high school students’ beliefs concerning EFL writing?Sixty-three students in Grade Three from The High School Affiliated to Soochow University participated in the experiment. The experiment lasted 15 weeks and each week the students took one class lasting 45 minutes. The instruments adopted in this study were the pretest and the posttest conducted in the Experimental Class and the Control Class respectively before and after the experiment and a questionnaire after the experiment. The data were collected and analyzed using SPSS to compare the changes on the part of the students in writing performance before and after the experiment and their beliefs towards the reading-based writing teaching approach.The results show that, both traditional five-step writing approach and reading-based writing approach can improve students’ writing proficiency, but reading-based writing instruction produces a better teaching outcome and more of the students would subconsciously use idiomatic English, which they learned from the reading materials. With reading-based writing instruction, students in the Experimental Class became less anxious and became more confident in English writing than those in the Control Class where the teacher took the traditional five-step approach.