An Experimental Study On The Effects Of The Process Approach On English Writing Proficiency Of Senior Students

Teaching English writing with suitable approaches is an important part of daily teaching at school,aiming to cultivate students’ comprehensive ability in English application.English writing proficiency is one of the most important aspects to assess English ability.New English Curriculum Standard has concrete standards for different level of proficiency for senior students.However,English writing proficiency is restricted by factors like the teaching approach and anxiety.To improve writing proficiency,different teaching approaches have been studied.Of them,the Process Approach which has prevailed in western counties since 1970 s distinguishes itself for its advantages.To examine whether the Process Approach can improve senior students’ English writing proficiency in some underdeveloped areas in China,a research was carried out by the author and tried to answer two questions: 1)Does the Process Approach have a positive effect on improving senior students’ English writing proficiency? 2)Can the Process Approach lower senior students’ English writing anxiety?The teaching experiment lasted 4 months,from September in 2016 to January in 2017.The subjects were from two natural classes of Senior Grade Two of a senior high school in Xinyi.Each class had 74 students with the same number of boys and girls.One class was chosen at random as the experimental class(EC)and taught with the Process Approach teaching model while the other class,as controlled class(CC),was taught in the traditional writing teaching way.Both classes were taught by the same teacher(the author)without student’s being informed of the teaching approaches.The research instruments included tests,questionnaires and interviews.The tests were used to check whether there was significant difference in students’ writing scores.The questionnaires were designed to investigate students’ writing state and their writing anxiety.Two interviews with 10 subjects from EC were conducted to find out students’ attitudes towards different teaching approaches.After data collection,the data were analyzed with SPSS 18.0 and an in-depth discussionon the two research questions was made.The data analysis indicated that after the experiment,the mean score of EC was higher than that of CC in the post-test,and the mean score of EC in post-test was also higher than that of in its pre-test.In addition,statistics from the questionnaires and the interviews show that students’ English writing anxiety is lowered with the use of the Process Approach.Thus,it can be concluded that the Process Approach not only can improve senior students’ English writing proficiency but can also lower students’ writing anxiety.It is suitable for senior high school students in underdeveloped area like Xinyi.