An Action Research On The Effects Of Prewriting Activities To English Writing Ability In Senior High Schools

Writing is indispensable in English learning, which occupies an important position in senior high schools' English teaching. The writing process can be divided into three stages: prewriting, composing and revising. Most high school students often don't know how to start writing when asked to write. And prewriting activities as the necessary step in prewriting stage, can make students understand writing themes and write quickly.This thesis aims to study the effect of prewriting activities on senior high school students' English writing, verifying whether prewriting activities can effectively improve their writing ability, and to obtain some teaching enlightenment of prewriting activities by continuous refinement. Research questions are :(1) Can prewriting activities help improve senior high school students' writing ability?(2) If prewriting activities can improve students' writing ability, which aspects are improved specifically?(3) How should teachers effectively organize the teaching of prewriting activities?A class of a key senior high school in Guangzhou was taken as the participants and 12 weeks' prewriting activities study were carried out. A pre-test and a questionnaire were conducted before the research, then the first six-week training went ahead, including brainstorming, classical invention, free-writing and cubing.Based on the analysis of interview, class observation, reflection was done on the first round. After the modification of the first round, the second six-week training was conducted, finally a post-test and a questionnaire were carried out. To analyze the results of the writing tests, questionnaires, interviews and class observation, the conclusions are as follows:(1) Prewriting activities help improve senior high school students' English writing. Students' scores of writing tests increase distinctly, and the results of theQuestionnaires, interviews, class observation all show the advancement of students' writing ability.(2) The improvements specifically lie in students' abundant writing content and fluent organization. Prewriting activities provide students with various writing techniques, help them to find writing materials, clear about what to write and how to write, thus enable them to write better. Under the collision of thoughts in prewriting stage, the writing content becomes abundant, the writing structure becomes more complete, while the vocabularies and language problems still need to be reinforced.(3) When teachers organize prewriting activities teaching, they should provide with as many as prewriting techniques possible. To improve students' awareness of using techniques by the training and guidance; In addition, teachers should divide them into groups reasonably, encourage them to help each other and get more writing inspiration, in order to write smoothly.This study put forward some pedagogical enlightenment for senior high schools' English writing teaching, although there are some limitations, it still can be the reference for future research.