A Research On The Application Of Brainstorming In Senior High School English Writing Teaching

Brainstorming was set forth by Alex Osborn,and now it refers to a thinking process in which the brain generates as many solutions as possible through unlimited free association in a certain time.And it is widely used in many fields to stimulate innovation.Nowadays,the application of brainstorming in English writing has absorbed many scholars’ attention.While learning the definition,characters and guidelines of brainstorming,the author consulted related research on the use of brainstorming in writing teaching at home and abroad.Based on the constructivism learning theory,and through theoretical analysis as well as empirical research,the author attempts to explore whether brainstorming is helpful for improving learners’ writing competence,to testify whether brainstorming teaching method could have positive influence on learners’ interest,attitude and self-confidence or other aspects in English writing.The author took the opportunity of teaching in Zhou Dang Senior high school in Luo Shan county to find the main problems of students in English writing by way of observation in class and interviews after class.Then the author conducted the experiment in two classes which were taught by herself,and there were totally 109 students involved in the experiment.Class one was set as the experimental class(54 students)and class two was the controlled class(55 students).After conducted the pre-test,there were no obvious divergence in writing proficiency in the two classes.For 20 weeks of that semester,students in the experimental class were conducted the brainstorming teaching method in English writing course;at the same time,the controlled class were conducted the traditional approach.In this thesis,the author gave an introduction of the preparation stage and implementation stage of applying brainstorming in writing class.And at the same time,main problems emerged during the experiment and solutions were mentioned in the paper.Questionnaires and composition tests were used to collect the relevant data of the experimental class and controlled class.Software Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS23.0)was used to analyze the data of experiment.Besides,an interview in the teachers who have marked compositions in the experiment was conducted to analyze the different writing situations of students before and after the experiment.The results of the experiment showed that the writing scores in both the two classesgot increased,but the writing scores in the experimental class was much higher than the scores in the controlled class;moreover,the writing competence and confidence of the students in the experimental class have been improved greatly.After a further analysis of the experiment results,finally the conclusion can be made as follows: Brainstorming can help to liven up the atmosphere of class,to motive students’ interest and improve their confidence in English writing,to stimulate students’ divergent thinking and improve their vocabulary as well as help to promote writing skills,and it is an effective way to English writing teaching in senior high school.