A Study On Application Of Experiential Learning To English Writing In Senior High School

As an important part of language output, writing is a comprehensive skill among the four skills which are listening, speaking, reading and writing. The traditional writing instruction pays too much attention to cultivating students' writing skill. Students mostly are in a passive state to use and remember the ready-made sentence and structure, and quite a few of them are scarcely ever to think about their writing process or make reflections after writing. At the same time, teachers attach more importance to students' writing text including language point and grammar instead of their writing experience. Teachers seldom consider how students think about the writing subject and organize their writing contents in the process of writing. These factors entirely make English writing a difficult task for English instruction.Experiential learning involves students' emotion, perception, thinking and behavior. It emphasizes students' participation in learning activities which greatly stimulate students' interest, promote their naturalistic acquisition and improve their initiative to learn English. According to the current condition of English writing instruction and the need of English curriculum reform, the researcher proposes the application of experiential learning to English writing in senior high school on the basis of the experiential learning theory of David Kolb with the aim of exploring the following two questions.1. Does experiential learning change students' attitude towards writing?2. Does experiential learning improve students' writing proficiency?In the study, both the quantitative and qualitative methods were used to collect and analyze the data. The participants of the research were students of Grade One in Pingshun Senior High School. There was no difference between the two classes before the experiment. Through the four-mouth experiment, experiential learning was applied to English writing instruction in the experimental group, while traditional teaching instruction was still used in the control group. After the experiment, the data of post-test was collected. In addition, an interview was conducted in the experimental group to get further information about students' opinions towards the new model.The results show that experiential learning can promote students' positive attitude towards English writing and improve their writing proficiency. It makes up for the drawback of the traditional writing instruction. Meanwhile, the study provides some practical implications for effective writing instruction on the basis of experiential learning.