Teaching English Writing With A Product-Process-Integrated Approach In Senior High School: An Action Research

English writing teaching,as an indispensable and irreplaceable part of English teaching in the senior high schools can both consolidate the knowledge students have learned in class and help them apply that knowledge to the practice through which they can develop the integrated language abilities.However,many serious problems exist in the current situation of my class.For example,as for many students,when it comes to writing tasks,they often have no words to write,which brings about their less interest and negative attitude toward their writing tasks.Thus,writing has become a common tough problem encountered by the students and English teachers and an urgent problem to be solved.For the limitations of my own and the specialty in Chinese teaching situation,there is no way to solve the difficulties in my teaching by applying any one of prevailing English writing approaches to the current English writing teaching.Such as product writing approach which helps students get a clear understanding of the features in language and structure of a specific genre while ignores the active participation of students during the writing process which results in the consequence that it is hard to cultivate learners' interest and process writing approach which lays more emphasis on the crucial role of students and the interaction among students and teachers while is time-consuming and hard to operate in a large-sized class.In view of the above problems,the study aims to solve the difficulties in the English writing teaching by an attempt to integrate product writing approach and process writing approach and then apply it to the English class.To be specific,action research was conducted to explore the effectiveness of a product-process-integrated approach in English writing teaching for senior high students.Two research questions were discussed in this study:(1)Can a product-process-integrated approach improve the attitude of learners toward writing and raise their interest in English writing?(2)Can a product-process-integrated approach improve learners' English writing ability? If yes,in what way? The evaluation of the study is based on the scoresof learners' attitude toward English writing and writing results.The 12-week study was conducted among 50 students in a Middle School of Zhaoqing city.Through the questionnaire,participants' difficulties were identified.The practical essays were selected for training on the basis of the tendency of writing in college entrance examination in recent years.There were three rounds of action research.The first round of action lasted 4 weeks.The topics on invitation letters were trained.The second round lasted 4 weeks.The topics on letters of apology were selected as research focuses.The third round also lasted 4 weeks.The topics on ask-for-help letters were done in this part.At the end of training,questionnaires and compositions were collected and the results were analyzed from quantitative and qualitative perspectives.The two major findings are as follows: Firstly,the combined approach can improve learners' attitude toward writing and raise their interest in writing.Secondly,the combined approach effectively improves their writing especially in content and passage structure.Thus we may have the following implications summarized: the combined approach can be an effective way in English writing teaching and learning which has a positive effect on the students' attitude and interest in English writing;according to the actual writing teaching and learning context,front-line teachers should try on further studies on the procedures in the combined approach to maximize the effectiveness in English writing teaching and learning.