An Empirical Study On The "Reading-to-Write" Model Based On The Discourse Knowledge In Junior High School English Writing Teaching

English writing is one of the four basic skills in English learning. The teaching of English writing is also an indispensable part of junior high school’s English teaching, which aims to enhance the students’ ability to use language knowledge and skills flexibly and comprehensively. However, current situation of junior high school’s writing teaching is still far from being satisfactory. Writing in English is a difficult job to language learning beginners. Meantime, coherence and organization also need to be improved as students are lacking in discourse knowledge. Reading and writing act as two different processes and they mutually interact with each other. Reading is the foundation of writing in that it provides the essential input for writing and writing in turn outputs and reinforces what the reader learned from the reading material. Therefore, according to the current situation of junior high school students’English writing and the relationship between reading and writing, the author advocates possibly a more practical and effective way of English writing teaching approach, namely the reading-to-write model, for junior high school students.This thesis is an empirical study of reading-to-write model. The study attempts to answer the following questions:1) What’s the situation of junior high school students’ writing competence?2) What’s the relationship between writing competence and reading competence?3) Is reading-to-write model an effective approach to improve junior high school students’ writing competence?4) What influence does reading-to-write model bring to students’ writing competence, especially on discourse level?The study consists of the following parts:firstly, a questionnaire paper was made to these participants to discuss the current situation of junior high school students’ reading and writing study; secondly, the author analyzed the correlation degree of English reading and writing competence through the test scores of reading and writing parts; thirdly, the discussion of the research question that whether the reading-to-write model is an effective approach to improve the students’ writing ability was made through teaching experiment; fourthly, the author analyzed the influences on discourse level after the experiment.The participants were 76 students in grade 8 from Hangzhou Wenhai Junior High School. During the four-month experiment, reading-to-write model was carried out in the experiment group. The major findings were presented as follow:1) Reading-to-write model can help junior high school students to improve their English writing competence effectively;2) It can help the students to get more discourse knowledge to improve their compositions in discourse level such as organization, structure and coherence;The implications from the study are that writing can be integrated with reading as the reading-to-write model to be taught to promote junior high school students’ writing competence, especially on the discourse level as more discourse knowledge can be acquired from reading.