A Study Of The Application Of Process Approach In English Writing In Junior High School

Writing in English as a language output ability is relatively difficult among the four major skills in English learning which includes listening,speaking,reading and writing.At the beginning of learning,writing is usually an imitation.It seems simple,but it is actually one of the most complex cognitive activities.Under the traditional product approach,teachers focus on practicing students' linguistic knowledge,such as vocabulary and grammar.Students can make up sentences with words,and string them together into a piece of grammatical text.However,they can hardly create a thought-provoking writing which has a specific purpose of social communication.This departs from the true purpose of writing.In this context,the process approach,taking the communication as the purpose,taking the students as the main body and paying attention to the students' writing process,came into being.Many domestic and foreign researchers have proved that compared with the product approach,the process approach is an important measure to improve the teaching of English writing,but the research object rarely involves junior high school students.Therefore,the purpose of this paper is to explore the effective method of applying process approach to English writing teaching in junior high school through experimental research.The writer selected 109 students in two parallel classes in the second grade of Yan'an Experimental Middle School as the research subjects and started a four-month teaching experiment.Among them,the junior two(21)class was the experimental class,and the process approach was used.The junior two(24)class was the control class,and was taught by the product approach.This experiment aims to answer two researchquestions:(1)can the process approach which is used in junior high school English writing teaching improve students' interest towards English writing?(2)can the process approach which is used in junior high school English writing teaching effectively improve students' English writing scores? The research process is divided into three stages: pre-test stage,teaching experiment stage and post-test stage.In the pre-test stage,the writer conducted questionnaire surveys and pre-writing tests for both experimental class and control class;during the teaching experiment stage,the writer used the process approach for English writing teaching in the experimental class.The teaching process has six procedures including pre-writing preparation,drafting and self-evaluation,peers' feedback,second draft writing,teacher evaluation,and final draft writing;in the post-test stage,the writer used the same questionnaire to conduct questionnaire surveys and post-writing tests for the experimental and control classes.The writer answers the above two research questions by analyzing the statistics of the previous and the last questionnaire surveys and writing test scores.The research results show that:(1)compared with the product approach,the process approach can highly improve junior high school students' interest and enhance their self-confidence in English writing;(2)compared with the product approach,the process approach can effectively improve junior high school students' English writing scores.