The Effects Of Joint Production On Junior High School Students' English Writing Scores And Writing Apprehension

English writing is one of basic language skills in listening,speaking,reading and writing.According to the requirements of English Curriculum Standards in compulsory education stage,students should acquire certain writing abilities,which can lay a solid foundation for further learning senior high.Therefore,English writing instruction plays an important role in junior high.However there are still some problems.Firstly,traditional writing instruction plays a dominate role in English class and students'writing abilities are seldom improved.Secondly,students keep negative attitude towards English writing and they also have wrnting apprehension to some extent.Therefore,this study focuses a new type of instructional treatment named joint production and tries to find out if the above problems can be handled.In this study,joint production was defined as a new type of instructional treatment.More specifically,in the process of English writing instruction,students orally present their ideas and the teacher writes them down at the same time.Therefore,it combines oral feedback and written feedback.The teacher can achieve adequate interaction with students and give them immediate feedback whatever in language form or content when they output language.The teacher and students work together to complete a composition and the teacher plays a scaffold role during joint production.This study is to research the effects of joint production on junior high school students' writing scores and writing apprehension and tries to solve the following questions:1)Does joint production help learners improve their wrntimg scores?2)What aspects of learners' writing abilities are affected greatly by joint production and why?3)Does joint production help learners alleviate writing apprehension?If so,in what aspects does joint production help learners alleviate wrntimg apprehension?This study adopted quasi-experimental design.The author selected two intact classes of grade eight in Shenzhen as research subjects.·There were eighty students together.These two classes were randomly regarded as experimental group(EG)and control group(CG).The experiment lasted one semester from March to July in 2018.The experimental group adopted joint production while control group used traditional writing instruction.The author adopted triangulation in this study.Both quantitative research methods and qualitative research methods were used to verify the effects of joint production on students'writing scores and writing apprehension including tests,writing apprehension scale and semi-structured interview.After joint production,twelve students received semi-structured interview.The author collected the data of pretest and posttest and then analyzed them through independent samples t test and paired samples t test to find out whether there exist differences in writing scores and writing apprehension between EG and CG.Besides,the data of interview were also collected and analyzed in order to supplement students' attitude and suggestions towards joint production.After one-semester joint production,the author concluded the following findings:1 Joint production helped students improve writing scores.2Joint production helped students improve writing abilities on content,organization and language use.Adequate reading materials,discussion in class and immediate feedback from teacher were main reasons for improvements on these three aspects.However,students',writing abilities on vocabulary and mechanics were not improved.3Joint production helped students alleviate writing apprehension.It mainly covered three aspects:behavior of writing anxiety,writing confidence and attitudes.More specifically,joint production helped students alleviate their writing apprehension in attitude greatly.Students' writing apprehension in behavior of anxiety and writing confidence was not reduced greatly.4.As for joint production,interviewees also put forward some workable and reasonable suggestions,such as providing more reading materials before class,selecting the group leader or ensuring task distribution and so on.