| There are four basic skills in English learning—listening, speaking, reading and writing. As a productive element, writing is indispensable in language acquisition and it could reflect a learner's comprehensive competence. Contrary to how things work in reality, writing has always been the weak part in English teaching. Even though many English learners spent more than ten years learning English, their actual writing ability can not meet the need of the social reality. What's worse, they can't use even the simple English sentences to express their own ideas or thoughts. There are three main reasons for this phenomenon:the first one is that teachers have to spend most of their time in teaching vocabulary and explaining grammatical rules under the pressure of college entrance examination; the second one is that the lack of native language environment increases the difficulty of language output; the third one is that most teachers teach reading and writing in a separate way in our traditional English writing classes, so they fail to make full use of the helpful writing resource—reading materials. Owing to this situation, there has grown up an urgent need to find a more useful and effective teaching method of English writing for the problems existing in the process of writing teaching in junior high school.Based on some other related research and the hypotheses of input and output, the author is going to apply reading-to-write approach in English class in junior high school to achieve the purpose of developing their writing competence through making full use of reading materials. This thesis attempts to find out the answers of the follow questions: (1) Is reading-to-write approach better in developing junior high school students' writing competence than the traditional method? (2) Can reading-to-write approach enrich junior high school students'writing strategies? (3) Can reading-to-write approach arouse junior high school students'writing interest? The reading-to-write approach was applied to Grade 7 in Hongling Middle School. The subjects involved in the experiment were 90 students randomly chosen from two parallel classes. And they were divided into experiment group and control group in the experiment. And the experimental group applied reading-to-write approach, while the control group still used traditional writing teaching method. All the students both from experimental and control group took part in a pretest at the beginning of the term and had a post-test and a questionnaire at the end of the term. The data were collected and analyzed through Independent-Samples T Test, Paired-Samples T Test and tests of statistical significance with SPSS 13.0. As the results have showed, the scores of experiment group were higher than that of control group, and there was a more significant and stable improvement on writing competence in experimental group. In addition, the students in experimental group made significant progress in acquiring vocabulary, applying grammar rules, analyzing and organizing discourse, etc. Through analyzing the questionnaire, we drew the conclusion that most of the students were satisfied with reading-to-write approach, for they considered it as a more effective way to improve their writing competence.As the author had expected, we could see that reading-to-write approach had a positive effect on developing students' writing competence and enhancing their writing strategies in junior high school from the conclusion part. So the author gave some suggestions to English teachers that they should make full use of the reading materials and integrate writing into reading classes in a scientific and reasonable way. Even though this study has achieved the expected goal to test the three hypotheses, there were still some limitations. Based on the conclusions and some relevant research, the researcher proposed some suggestions on developing students' writing competence for future studies at the end of the study. |
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