An Empirical Study On The Application Of Project-based Approach To The Teaching Of English Writing For General Academic Purpose

With the economic globalization and the internationalization of higher education,international academic communication has increasingly deepened.The trend of Englishization affects almost all disciplines in the academic world(Schluer,2014:1),which highlights the importance of academic English writing.It was since 2003 that domestic researches on writing of English for Academic Purposes(EAP)have rapidly developed,which was 9 years behind the researches abroad.In addition,the existing relevant researches pay more attention to the theoretical study and the design of teaching contents,especially focusing on the teaching of English for Special Academic Purposes(ESAP)for English majors.Whereas,there are few mature teaching modes and empirical examples as reference in terms of writing teaching of English for General Academic Purposes(EGAP).Based on the theory of constructivism and multiple intelligences,with Project-based Approach(PBA)as method,the author conducted an empirical study by selecting two parallel classes of non-English majors with advanced English proficiency from Guangxi University(a total of 70 students,35 in experimental class,and 35 in control class).Students in experimental class adopted the student-centered PBA,while the students in control class adopted the teacher-centered traditional teaching method.It was aimed to prove the effectiveness of PBA on the EGAP writing teaching with quantitative and qualitative analysis.The length of the experiment lasted one semester,14 weeks.The research was intended to answer the following three questions:First,at the end of the semester,are there any differences between the experimental class and the control class in EGAP writing,and in what aspects?Second,to what extent does the application of PBA improve students' EGAP writing level in experimental class,and in what aspects?Third,how do the students of experimental class evaluate the application of PBA?The author took the scores of pre-test and post-test as variables,research paper as analyzed text;combined the results of questionnaire and interviews;collected and analyzed all the relevant data with the help of Ant Conc and Range32,and did comparative analyses by using of SPSS22.0 through the independent sample T-test and paired sample T-test.Finally,the research draws the following conclusions.It turns out that there are significant differences between the two parallel classes after the experiment.The EGAP writing ability of the experimental class is higher than that of the control class,which is reflected in the aspects of test scores,errors,total number of writing words,and frequency of academic words,academic lexical density and writing formality.Because of PBA,the experimental class benefits a lot in various aspects,such as learning ability,problem-solving ability,and self-evaluation;while the control class does not.The experimental class speaks highly of PBA,but the control class is not satisfied with the traditional teaching method and expects to have a change.Therefore,the conclusion proves the effectiveness of PBA and enlightens the practice about the teaching of EGAP writing.