Positive Psychology In High School English Writing Teaching: An Empirical Study Of Senior High Grade One

Positive Psychology(PP) is a newly developed study in American psychological field at the end of the 20 t h century. It advocates researches on human’s positive qualities and potential energy to fulfill self- realization, social commitments and the desire of attaining happiness. However, in present senior high English teaching, too much a ttention has been paid to knowledge, with psychological needs of interest, confidence and well-being unduly neglected.To explore the effects that PP may have on senior high English writing teaching, this paper made an empirical study on some students in J iangyin Senior High School in the light of PP’s subjective well-being and self-determination theories. Of the author’s two classes, C lass 14 Grade 1 was chosen as experimental group and C lass 12 Grade 1 as control group. Every month in the second semester, all these students attended an English writing class. The author taught the experimental group with PP concepts and methods during the different stages of writing process. In contrast, the conventional teaching mode was still employed in the control class, with little attention paid to the students’ psychology. In order to find out the changes in writing strategy and subjective well-being, two questionnaires were distributed: The Subjective Happiness Questionnaire and Senior High English Writing Strategy Questionnaire. They were designed on the base of the ones provided by Ren Jun(2006) and Petric & C zarl(2003), with revisions according to the practical situation of Senior One. Besides, the two Wuxi final test papers of Grade O ne were taken before and after the experiment as the pre-test and post –test, and their statistics were compared and analyzed via SPSS 19.0, to see the effect of PP on writing performance.The findings reveal that after applying PP to English writing teaching, the students can gradually acquire writing strategies such as how to explore topics, arrange passages and correct mistakes, and that their writing ability is much enhanced with average score and lowest mark both increased considerably. Moreover, their self-confidence, positive attitude and subjective well-being have been highly activated.