Research On The Application Of The Length Approach To English Writing Teaching In Junior High School

As one of the English basic skills, English writing is always taken as a weak link during English teaching and learning in junior high school. Considering this problem, the Length Approach is put forward as a new-type approach for English writing teaching. With this approach, students are required to write based on their interests during the period of which they get the active guidance from the teacher. While with the Length Approach, the teacher needs to adjust the writing requirements constantly, increase the vocabulary gradually and encourage students to write as long as they can, eventually, students’ English writing ability is expected to improve by enhancing sense of achievement and writing confidence.Since the Length Approach was proposed, it has drawn much attention from many scholars who have put this approach into practice in English writing teaching in universities, vocational colleges and senior high schools with success and all these practices have got satisfactory results. However, people ignore to apply the Length Approach to English writing teaching in junior high school. Hence, learned from experience of predecessor’s research, this research attempts to apply the Length Approach to English writing teaching in junior high school, and the following two questions are proposed in the research:1. Will the junior high school students hold a positive attitude to the Length Approach?2. Will the Length Approach contribute to improving the English writing ability of junior high school students?In the experiment, totally 80 junior high school students are selected as the research subject. They are from two parallel classes in Grade 2 of No. 3 Junior High School in Xingtai City and each class has 40 students. In total, the experiment lasts one semester.During the period of training, the control class is still taught by the traditional English writing teaching method as before while the experimental class is trained with the Length Approach. To answer the questions, questionnaires, English writing tests and an interview are employed in the research, and the results of the research are satisfying. On the one hand,the results of the analyses for questionnaires and the interview indicate that the junior high school students can hold a positive view on the Length Approach; on the other hand, the results of the analyses for English writing tests demonstrate that the English writing abilityof the students in experimental class has been greatly improved after the training of the Length Approach. Hence, the Length Approach is proved to be an effective approach in English writing teaching of junior high school.