Effects Of Reading-to-write On Senior High School Students' English Writing Quality

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of reading-to-write on senior high school students'English writing quality.The theories on which this study was based were Krashen's input hypothesis,Swain's output hypothesis and the schema theory.The research questions in the study are as follows:1.Does reading-to-write affect senior high school students' English writing quality in terms of content,organization and language?If yes,what are the effects?2.Are there any differences in the effect of reading-to-write on lower-level students' and higher-level students' English writing quality in terms of content,organization and language?If yes,what are the differences?The study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods.The quantitative research mainly involved two written tests.Altogether 75 Grade Eleven students in Yangzhou Guazhou Senior High School were chosen as participants,including 40 students in the experimental class(EC)and 35 students in the control class(CC).According to the pre-test,EC and CC were found out to have no significant differences in terms of their overall level of English writing and the three specific aspects of content,organization and language.The experiment lasted from Aril 2,2018 to June 7,2018.The pre-test paper and post-test paper were all chosen from the written tests in Jiangsu College Entrance Examination.During the experiment,reading-to-write was applied to EC for two months.For CC,the students were taught with the conventional method.After the experiment,the results of the post-test were analyzed with Independent Samples T-test and Paired Samples T-test.The qualitative research mainly involved the interview with eight representative students.The interview was conducted one by one in the meeting room on June 7,2018,the day after the post-test.The interview was conducted in Chinese.After the interview,the researcher transcribed the recorded content,translated it into English and took detailed notes of their answers.The major findings could be summarized as follows:(1)The research proved that applying reading-to-write to the teaching of English writing in senior high school had a positive effect on improving their overall English writing quality and all the three specific aspects of content,organization and language.Through reading-to-write,students improved a lot on content because they could learn the content information,like opinions,and arguments from the strictly-selected and carefully-refined reading materials.The reason for their improvement in organization might be that they imitate the structures in the well organized and perfectly coherent reading materials.For language improvement,students acquired many alternative useful words,phrases and sentence patterns through reading-to-write.(2)For students of different proficiency levels,reading-to-write had significant effects on students' overall writing quality.Reading-to-write had significant effect on higher-level students'writing quality in terms of content and language.With higher-level students spending more time reading English extended materials after class,they could improve more in their English writing quality.Besides,lower-level students improved a lot on their English writing quality in terms of content organization and language.The lower-level students,even with poor English knowledge,still benefited from reading-to-write in their English writing.This study had some limitations.First,this research only dealt with 8 interviewees in the interview,which was not large enough.The participants were the Grade Eleven students in the senior high school,so the results might not be applicable to all the grades in senior high schools.Second,the length of the study was not long enough.The research only lasted for two months.Third,the author applied some argumentative essays as the extended reading materials,which might not represent all types of reading.Based on the research findings above,implications for senior high school students and English teachers were proposed.Firstly,teachers should create more opportunities to expose students to sufficient reading materials,which can help students in English writing.Secondly,teachers should pay more attention to lower-level students while applying reading-to-write.