Application Of Adaptation Theory In Junior Middle School English Writing Teaching

Adaptation theory was put forward by Jef Verschueren in his book Understanding Pragmatics in 1999.It is a new pragmatic theory which views language use as a process of continuously making linguistic choices.This “making of choices” is determined by three key notions(variability,negotiability and adaptability).Adaptation theory regards adaptability as the starting point and describes and explains language use from the four aspects: contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptability.The study makes an attempt to apply adaptation theory to junior middle school English writing teaching.English writing is also a kind of language use and the writing process is the conscious process of adaptation at contextual and language structural levels in a dynamic way.To testify the feasibility and efficiency of the application of adaptation theory to English writing teaching,an empirical study is carried out.The study is carried out in Grade Nine in Hefei Shouchun Middle School.The subjects are80 students from two chosen classes.They are taught by the same teacher,using the same teaching materials.They are given the same kind of teaching methods before the experiment while during the experiment,there will be two different models of English writing teaching in the two classes.All the data collected from both the pre-test and post-test are handled with SPSS13.0.The results of questionnaires should also be collected and analyzed in the inductive and analytical way.The results of the research testify that English writing teaching based on adaptation theory not only has a positive effect on students' attitudes towards English writing but also can help to improve students' writing competence.But due to the confinement of experimental conditions,this study has some limitations.As for these limitations,the author provides some recommendations for further study.