The Study Of The Reading-to-Writing Approach In English Writing Teaching In Middle Schools

Writing,one of the four skills,reflects students' personal comprehensive language ability.Students' written ability shows not only the master of language knowledge but also thinking ability,which makes students' learning and teachers' teaching more meaningful and valuable.However,in today's English teaching in middle schools,writing teaching is far from satisfaction.It is based on the grammar-oriented method,focusing on vocabulary and sentence structures,regardless of organization,cohesion or coherence.As we all know,reading and writing,in reality,interact with each other in the learning process and reading can lay a foundation on writing.This research was done among 60 students in Grade Eight from a middle school in Shanghai Pudong New District within 20 weeks.They were from two parallel teaching classes taught by the same English teacher.During the experiment,the reading-to-writing approach was carried out in the experimental class while the control class was conducted in the normal teaching routine.This study attempts to answer the following questions:1.How are the reading materials integrated and optimized?2.How are the strategies of reading integrating writing and activities carried out?3.Which aspects does reading-to-writing approach bring progress to?The process of experiment is listed as follows.Firstly,the author devised a questionnaire to know about students' writing currency,writing attitude,etc.Next,the writing scores of the two classes before the experiment were compared by virtue of content,language and organization.Then,during the experiment,the writing scores of the two classes were analyzed by virtue of content language and organization three times gradually.Finally,students were chosen to take part in an interview to know about the students' opinion on writing and the way to write after the experiment.The author has found from the experiment that the writing score of the experimental class is obviously higher than that of controlling class,especially in language and content because there are fewer vocabulary and grammar mistakes;students' language ability and discourse level are higher;students write in English thinking;students' inner motivation of writing is stronger.In conclusion,the reading-to-writing approach is effective so it should be put into practice in English writing for middle school students.