Application Of Flipped Classroom In Middle School English Writing Teaching

English writing in middle school has been a thorny issue for a long time. With the advancement of the new curriculum reform in middle school, a series of new demands were put forward to junior high school English writing teaching and students' writing ability. However, the problems which were exposed are increasing accordingly. For example, teacher may ignore writing teaching due to limit of class hours and the student may abandon writing exercises because of the academic burden; the teacher adopts cramming-teaching style, which ignores cultivation of students' independent learning and cooperative inquiry abilities, etc. As a new mode of teaching and class organization, the flipped classroom provides new ideas and inspiration for education reform and it focuses more on stimulating students' interest, emphasizing the cultivation of students' autonomous learning ability and cooperative innovation capability. It also helps teacher effectively alleviate the contradiction of insufficient practice in English writing due to lack of class time. All these characteristics are coincided with the new English curriculum requirements.For these reasons, this study attempts to use the flipped classroom mode in junior high school English writing class to explore the teaching design and implementation strategies in English writing class. It aims to investigate the feasibility of the new mode of teaching in middle school and students' learning attitude toward it. The subjects in the present study were 2 parallel classes(60 students) chosen from the second-year junior high school students in A middle school in Jingdezhen. A teaching experiment was conducted to study the influence of the flipped classroom teaching model on the improvement of students' writing level. The experiment was supplemented by the three methods of questionnaire, interview and self-evaluation form of students, which investigated whether the teaching model can improve the students' interest in writing, change students' writing attitude and increase the pressure on students. The experimental design includes three stages, including before-class, in-class and after-class sections. In the before-class section, students need to complete the study of the new knowledge with the help of videos and paper materials issued by teachers. In the in-class section, teachers use the methods of classroom discussion and ideas sharing to complete the interpretation of new knowledge. In the after-class section, on the basis of analysis and explanation of model essays by teachers, students need to complete the modification of their own compositions. The content of the questionnaire mainly includes three aspects: the investigation of the students' learning attitude before the experiment, the attitude on the flipped classroom after the experiment and the students' interest in writing after the experiment.The major findings are as follows: 1. Compared with the test result of the control group, the writing ability of the experimental group did not have any significant difference(P=0.239). But compared with the previous test results, the overall writing ability of the experimental group has improved a lot(P=0.000). 2. It is found that the experimental group performed better in the field of organization structure of the composition after the experiment. But the performance of students in grammar aspects showed no significant differences. 3. According to the interviews and questionnaires, the preferences of students to teaching mode of flipped classroom reached as high as 85.3%. However, teaching in flipped classroom can still hardly promote the initiatives of students towards English writing, since almost 85% of the students remained negative in emotions to English writing.The present study has some pedagogic suggestions concerning English writing: The teacher needs to pay more attention to the self-learning content and time arrangement, strengthen the revision of learning content, increase individual counseling, and strengthen the students' writing feedback in flipped classroom teaching mode.