An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Reading-to-write Approach On Senior High School Students' English Writing Anxiety And Achievement

Of the four basic language skills in English learning,writing is considered as an indispensable part in senior high school English teaching.However,English writing,as a kind of productive skill,is also a weak point for senior high school students.Most of them suffer from English writing anxiety.Reading-to-write is a teaching method which combines reading and writing effectively to improve students' writing ability.It opens a new perspective for English writing teaching,provides students with a new learning method and has a great significance for cultivating students' reading ability and writing ability.Therefore,it has attracted a lot of attention of English educators in China.Based on Horwitz' Foreign Language Anxiety and Pickering and Garrod's Interactive Alignment Model,this thesis aims at exploring whether reading-to-write approach can lower students' writing anxiety and improve their writing achievements.There are two questions to be addressed in this study.(1)How effective is reading-to-write approach in reducing senior high school students' anxiety in English writing?(2)What effect does reading-to-write approach have on senior high school students' English writing in terms of content,language accuracy,sentence pattern and contextual coherence?A teaching experiment which lasts for three months is adopted in this study.Ninety students from two parallel classes in Grade One of Minxian No.3 middle school are selected as subjects.A pretest is conducted firstly to ensure there is no obvious difference between the experimental class and the control class in their English writing.At the same time,the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory(SLWAT)compiled by Taiwan scholar Cheng Y.S.(2004)is adopted to evaluate the students' writing anxiety level.Then reading-to-write approach and process writing approach are employed in EC and CC respectively.A post-test is carried out to testify whether students' writing achievements are significantly improved after the treatment.And the SLWAT is employed again to test whether the students' writinganxiety is reduced or not.From the data analysis,the researcher comes to the following conclusions:Firstly,as a whole,students' writing anxiety in the experimental class has decreased compared with the control class.To be specific,cognitive anxiety is apparently declined,while somatic anxiety and avoidance behavior have no significant difference between the two classes.It is concluded that reading-to-write approach is helpful to reduce students' writing anxiety.Secondly,by the comparison of pretest and post-test,the data shows that although students in EC have no significant difference in terms of sentence pattern compared with CC,students in EC perform better in content,language accuracy and contextual coherence.Therefore,conclusion can be drawn that reading-to-write approach is an effective way of improving senior high school students' writing achievements.This study brings us some implications.First of all,in order to help students obtain sufficient language input for writing,the English teachers in high school can provide more comprehensible and interesting reading materials,which are beneficial to relieve students' writing burden and reduce their writing anxiety.What's more,the teachers are supposed to offer proper guidance to the students and remind them to pay more attention to the content,language accuracy,sentence pattern and contextual coherence of the reading materials so as to enhance their writing quality.