The Effect Of Reading-to-write On Postgraduates' English Writing

The writing ability is an important skill that foreign language learners should master and for a long time,scholars have conducted a number of studies for effective writing teaching methods.The present study is also conducted to test the effectiveness of a kind of English writing teaching method,namely the reading-to-write approach.Unlike the previous studies,most of which have focused on junior high and senior high school students,the present study focuses on a group of non-English majored postgraduates,for whom it is still of importance to improve their academic English writing ability.As syntactic complexity is an important index for the development of written production,this study tests the effect of the reading-to-write approach from the perspective of syntactic complexity.The present study is a longitudinal experimental study among a class of forty-one non-English majored postgraduates,with a pre-test writing and a post-test writing respectively conducted before and after the experiment.Since the effect of the reading-to-write approach on students' English writing is tested from the perspective of syntactic complexity,a total of thirteen syntactic complexity indexes are chosen in the present study to characterize the syntactic development in writing,which include ten effective classic syntactic complexity indexes and three frequently used fine-grained phrasal complexity indexes.The ten classic syntactic complexity indexes are classified from four dimensions: length of production units,amount of subordination,amount of coordination and sophistication of complex nominals.The three fine-grained phrasal complexity indexes employed in the present study are dependents per nominal subject,dependents per direct object and dependents per prepositional object.After the teaching experiment,the development of these indexes is analyzed by a syntactic complexity analyzer named TAASSC(Tool for Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity).Moreover,in order to see whether the developmental patterns of these syntactic complexity indexes can contribute to the writing quality under the reading-to-write approach,correlations between the syntactic complexity and the holistic writings are analyzed.The results have revealed that 1)the reading-to-write approach can have some substantial influence on the syntactic complexity development in the non-English majored postgraduates' English writing.Specifically,among all the indexes chosen in the present study,the values of ten indexes have significantly increased after the teaching experiment,including the three length-based indexes,the two indexes on phrasal coordination,the two indexes on sophistication of complex nominals and the three fine-grained phrasal complexity indexes.However,the values of the other three indexes have slightly declined which include the two indexes on clausal subordination and the index on clausal coordination;2)the developmental patterns of most syntactic complexity indexes under the reading-to-write approach can contribute to the students' writing quality.Specifically,among the ten syntactic complexity indexes that have shown an increasing trend of development,nine indexes present a significantly positive correlation with the holistic writing scores with only one fine-grained phrasal complexity index almost showing no correlation with the holistic writing scores.As for the other three indexes which have presented a decreasing trend of development,they almost have no correlation with the holistic writing scores.In summary,the syntactic complexity development in students' English writing is characterized by use of longer production units and more complex phrases under the reading-to-write approach,which can further facilitate the students' writing quality.Therefore,from this perspective,the reading-to-write approach is an effective English writing teaching method to the non-English majored postgraduates.