On The Experiment Of "Reading-towrite" Approach In The Teaching Of English Writing In Junior High School

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are four basic skills in English for the students in junior high school in their English learning.As an important language output skill,writing can reflect a student's cognitive ability and language comprehensive competence.Besides,the English Curriculum Standards(2011)puts forward writing standards of Level 3-5 for Grade 7-9.Moreover,writing takes 15 points of the total in the entrance exam paper for Senior High School,which indicates English writing plays an important role in the English teaching of the junior high schools.However,the students' English writing is not that satisfactory.Major problems include lack of interest,grammatical mistakes,lack and misusage of vocabulary,nimiety of simple sentences and so on.In fact,these problems result from lack of enough language input.As we know,reading integrates closely with writing.Reading can increase vocabulary,expand knowledge and provide authentic language materials so as to lay a solid language foundation for writing.Based on Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis and Merrill Swain's output hypothesis,this research aims to apply “Reading-to-write” approach into the teaching of English writing in junior high school in an attempt to explore the positive effects of “Reading-to-write” approach on the students' writing ability.The present research carries out the teaching experiment based on the following two research questions:(1)What are the main positive effects of “Reading-to-write” approach on the junior students' writing?(2)What are the main effective teaching methods in the application of “Reading-to-write” approach in the teaching of English writing in junior high schools ?Research subjects are eighty-one students,who are from two parallel classes of Grade Eight in Affiliated Middle School of Henan Normal University.There are forty students in the experimental class and they are taught with “Reading-to-write” approach.Besides,there are forty-one students in the controlled class and they are taught with a traditional writing teaching approach.The teaching experiment lasts twenty weeks.This study adopts questionnaires,pre-test and post-test as the main methods and then analyzes the data and summarizes the results.The results of the research show the following aspects:(1)The major positive effects that “Reading-to-write” approach has on the junior high school students include: At first,the obviously reduced errors the students made in their English writing,such as spelling mistakes,grammatical errors,Chinglish and so on;Second,the improvement of the students' imitation of words and sentences from their reading materials to their composition;Third,the improved scores of the students' English compositions from the experimental class;Fourth,the decrease of students' emotional resistance on English writing and the increase of their interest and confidence in English composition.(2)The major effective teaching methods in the application of the “Reading-to-write” approach into the teaching of English writing are imitating writing,rewriting and expanding writing,among which the students favor imitating writing and rewriting.The thesis includes five chapters.Chapter One is introduction,which includes research background,research significance,research objectives and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is literature review,which first introduces the researches on teaching approaches of English writing,and the presents the studies on “Reading-to-write” approach at home and abroad,and related theoretical bases.Chapter Three is the research design for this study.It consists of research questions,research subjects,instruments and procedure.Chapter Four is the essential part of this study,which offers the results and analysis.Chapter Five is conclusion,which first summarizes the major findings,and then presents the pedagogical implications and finally points out the limitations of the research along with the suggestions for future research.