Reading-Writing Connections Approach:Effect Of Texts As Input

Textbooks are the core of course resources,and the present senior high English textbooks comprise texts of various topics,in authentic language and with moderate difficulty,which are helpful for students to develop their language skills in various aspects.The overall goal of senior high English curriculum is to develop students' abilities of autonomous learning and cooperative learning,to form effective English learning strategies and to cultivate students' comprehensive linguistic competence.[1] As the two most essential ways of language acquisition,comprehension must be closely related to production.However,in senior high English teaching at present,reading is disassociated from writing.Therefore,how to effectively relate reading to writing is not only a challenge facing senior high English teachers,but also a topic worthy of empirical research.Under the guidance of Input Hypothesis Theory and Output Hypothesis Theory,the present study investigated senior high students' reading-writing connections awareness,and a four-month teaching experiment was conducted via a reading-writing connections approach to the teaching of senior high English writing,taking texts as input,so as to detect changes in the subjects' English writing proficiency prior and post the experiment.The study aims at answering the following four research questions.1)To what extent are the subjects aware of reading-writing connections? 2)With reading texts as input,does the reading-writing connections approach have significant effects on improving senior-high subjects' English as Foreign Language(EFL)writing? 3)Taught in reading-writing connections approach,do the subjects across different language proficiency groups have different gains in English writing? 4)Is there any relationship between the subjects' reading-writing connections awareness and their English writing performance? Subjects of the study were taken from two ordinary classes and one high proficiency class of the tenth grade at a suburban high school of a provincial capital.The teaching experiment lasted four months.Before the study,two questionnaire surveys were conducted to investigate the basic information of subjects' English learning and their reading-writing connections awareness.Their English writing proficiency was tested before and after the experiment to detect whether reading-writing connections approach is effective to the teaching of senior EFL writing.Also,the data from the pre-test and the post-test were analyzed to detect differences in the subjects' gains in English writing across different language proficiency groups.Results of the study reveal that,firstly,senior high subjects' reading-writing connections awareness is not so strong.Secondly,reading-writing connections approach,taking texts as input,can improve the subjects' English writing proficiency.Texts close to the subjects' daily life and fit to their age-group characteristics with moderate difficulty are appropriate input materials to be used in senior high English writing class.Thirdly,the reading-writing connections approach is beneficial to improve subjects' English writing proficiency for both high and low proficiency classes.Finally,the subjects' reading-writing connections awareness is positively related to their English writing performance.Some newly learned words,sentences,texts structures as well as conjunctive words from the texts are used in their English writing.