A Study Of The Application Of Process Approach Based On Appraisal Theory To High School English Writing Teaching

English writing ability is an output ability of language learners to use language comprehensively,which plays an important role in English teaching.High school stage is one important stage to foster students' comprehensive ability.However,under the pressure of the exam-oriented education,English teachers in high school lay too much emphasis on vocabulary,grammar and reading.As a result,English writing teaching has not been given enough attention.Due to the lack of sufficient writing exercises and teachers' timely guidance,students' English writing ability in high school are generally weak and need to be improved.Therefore,how to cultivate learners' English writing ability has become an urgent task in high school English teaching.Both Product Approach and Process Approach have much impact among many kinds of researches on English writing teaching.Currently,Product Approach has predominated in high school English writing teaching,which highlights the writing outcome.Its teaching mode is that the teacher explains the model essay,the students imitate it to write and finally the teacher appraises all the drafts.Students are in a passive position with lack of communication between students and teachers.Oppositely,laying special emphasis on the students' writing process,subject position and communication between partners and the teacher,Process Approach argues that writing is a cognitive and creative process.Besides,Appraisal Theory,put forward by Martin(2000),is the extending study on the interpersonal meaning of English discourses.As a means of interaction,English writing belongs to the micro discourse,so Appraisal Theory also applies.However,Appraisal Theory is seldom applied to the study of English writing teaching.This paper attempts to apply Appraisal Theory and Process Approach together to the study of high school English writing teaching with mutual macroscopic and microscopic influence on learners' English writing acquisition.The author has conducted a teaching experiment with Grade Two students of Fengnan No.2 Senior High School in Tangshan City as the experimental subjects for 16 weeks based on the combination of Appraisal Theory and Process Approach,in order to test the effectiveness of the new teaching approach.Specifically,both its influence on the students' English writing attitudes and its role in improving the students' English writing achievements have been studied.By means of questionnaires,pre-test and post-test,interviews,the research results indicate that Process Approach based on Appraisal Theory is beneficial to change students'writing attitudes and improve their writing achievements.It is hoped that this study can not only offer enlightenments for high school English writing teaching,but also promote the application of Appraisal Theory in foreign language teaching.However,due to the limitation of some factors,this study still needs further improvements.