A Research Of The Effects Of Production-oriented Approach On English Writing Discourse Of High School Students

Language competence is an important part of the key competencies that was put forward by the newly issued National English Curriculum Standards for General high School(2018),in which writing is one of the most important skills.Previous studies have shown that cohesion and coherence are two important influential factors on students' writing quality.However,for the majority of high school students,writing discourse is the weakest part of their English writing,which has problems such as the abuse of cohesive devices,sentence structure disorder and discourse incoherence.Therefore,it is important to figure out how to improve the quality of English writing discourse through writing teaching.In the field of foreign language teaching research in China,professor Wen Qiufang and her team have proposed and proved that Production-oriented Approach(POA)is an innovative method with Chinese characteristics which can effectively improve students' English ability.In this context,this research applied the POA to the teaching of English writing in senior high school to study the influence of this teaching model on the discourse of English writing in senior high school students.The discourse cohesion and coherence are important factors affecting the quality of writing discourse,thus this thesis studied the influence of POA teaching model on students' writing discourse.In particular,it studied the effect of this teaching model on the cohesion and coherence in their writings,and further,on their writing discourse,the direct indication of the writing ability in the end.In this study,87 students from class 4 and class 6 of Grade one in T Middle school in N city,J province were taken as the research subjects,and the experimental teaching lasted for more than three months.The Experimental Class(EC)adopted the POA teaching model for English writing,and the Control Class(CC)adopted the traditional writing teaching model.Through the writing test and monthly examination,the data of students' English writing samples and English scores were respectively collected.The variety of discourse cohesion and coherence was analyzed byCoh-Metrix3.0.All these collected data were analyzed by SPSS 23.0.This study aimed to explore the following questions: 1)What are the effects of the Production-oriented Approach on students' English writing discourse cohesion in senior high schools? 2)What are the effects of the Production-oriented Approach on the writing discourse coherence of senior high school students? 3)What are the effects of the Production-oriented Approach on the English writing achievement of senior high school students?Specifically speaking,the POA teaching model was applied in Class 4,which was set as the Experimental Class(EC).Class 6 was set as the Control Class(CC),in which the traditional teaching model was applied.Before the experiment,chi-square test and independent sample T-test were used to process the discourse cohesion,each variables of coherence,students' English score and writing score.The results showed that there were no significant differences in students' English discourse cohesion,coherence,English total score and writing score between EC and CC,and the two classes could be used as parallel classes for experimental teaching.After the experiment,chi-square test,a paired-samples T-test and an independent sample T-test were conducted to analyze the changes of the use of cohesive device and the discourse coherence in students' writing discourse,and to analyze the changes of their English writing scores.In addition,by analyzing the correlation between cohesion,coherence and writing score,the internal relationship between writing discourse and writing score can be further study.Through data analysis,the results were found as follows: 1)As for the discourse cohesion,five kinds of cohesive devices including reference,ellipsis,substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion were analyzed.After the experiment,there was a significant difference in the amount and types of cohesive device used by students and students' writing discourse cohesion.2)In terms of discourse coherence,three indicators of partial coherence were conducted,namely,CRFAO1,CRFSO1 and LSASS1.There were significant differences in CRFAO1 and LSASS1,but no significant difference in CRFSO1.Four indicators of whole coherence were conducted: CRFAOa,CRFSOa,LSASSp and LSAPP1,among which CRFAOa,LSASSp and LSAPP1 all had significant differences,while CRFSOa had no significant difference.3)After the experiment,the English writing scores of students in EC have improved significantly,and there was a significant difference between the EC and CC(p<.05).The cohesion and coherence of students' writing discourse werepositively correlated with their writing scores.Therefore,this research indicated that: 1)POA teaching of English writing could positively affect students' English writing discourse cohesion.2)POA teaching of English writing could effectively improve students' writing discourse coherence.3)POA teaching of English writing could effectively improve high school students' English writing scores.In other words,POA teaching of English writing could effectively improve high school students' English writing discourse ability and the equality of writing discourse,which was significantly different from that of the traditional teaching.In addition,the improvement of writing discourse ability also has a positive impact on the improvement of writing ability,especially on the cohesion and coherence of discourse.