A Study On Writing Activities In High School English Textbooks Based On The Cognitive Process Theory Of Writing

As an output skill with high cognitive requirements,writing involves the orchestration of different cognitive sub-processes and has always been a weak area for foreign language learners.Whether a writer can produce high-quality compositions depends partly on the orchestration in composing processes(Ong,2014).Textbooks,as important media and means for carrying out teaching,rely on the design of teaching activities to achieve teaching objectives.As textbooks ultimately point to the cognitive processes of students’ learning,activity designs must meet students’ cognitive requirements,so as to provide guidance and support for students’ writing cognitive processes.The studies on writing activities at home and abroad mainly focus on the exploration of the effectiveness of different types of writing activities,the factors influencing the implementation effect of writing activities,the interactive influence between writing activities with other perspectives of learning.There is a lack of researches on writing activities in textbooks,and the researches which are from the perspective of cognitive process are scarcer,which is not conducive to the deep and comprehensive comprehension of the characteristics of writing activity designs.Therefore,based on the Cognitive Process Theory of Writing proposed by Flower&Hayes(1981),this study analyzes instructions in writing sections in four sets of high school English textbooks,namely Textbooks of PEP Edition,BNUP Edition,OUP Edition and FLTRP Edition to explore what kind of writing activities in textbooks can provide support for students’ writing cognitive processes.Meanwhile,in view of the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High(2017),this thesis evaluates the characteristics of these writing activities and draws implications for textbook designers and teachers.The findings of this research are summarized as follows:Firstly,the following activities in textbooks can provide guidance for students’cognitive processes of writing.For representing task environment,there are activities for assigning tasks and creating contexts.With regard to the generation of ideas,there are brainstorming,question and answer,discussion,debate,interview,reading and listening activities.For organizing ideas,there are sample analysis,layout writing,development of article and linking activities.As for revising,there are self-editing,peer-editing,rewriting and post-writing activities.Secondly,in view of the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High(2017),the characteristics of writing activities designs in providing guidance and support for students’ cognitive processes are embodied in the following four facets:First,in creating task environment,it can provide multi-topic task environments to provide contextual representations for students and give consideration to practicality as well.However,the number of activities for building the task environment accounts for a low percentage and the task environment lacks contextual authenticity,which is not conducive to the writer’s comprehensive representation of the task environment and stimulation of writers’ genuine writing purposes.Second,for generating ideas,writing activity designs are rich and diverse,which can well mobilize the information stored in students’ long-term memory and can provide appropriate external resource support.Third,the activities for organizing ideas can give consideration to both overall and partial orchestration and coherence but fail in cultivating students’ textual consciousness and organizational strategies as a whole,impeding students’ effective and independent ideas organization and framework construction processes.Fourth,the revising part involves a whole-process activity design but lacks proper guidance and support for students’ cognitive processes as there is no clear evaluation standard and easy-to-operate mode for them,impeding students’ effective reflection and evaluation on their writing outcome.Based on the characteristics of writing activities in textbooks,corresponding suggestions for textbook designers and teachers are put forward.First of all,textbook designers should strengthen the creation of task environment from the aspects of quantity of activities and context authenticity,attach importance to the cultivation of discourse awareness and organizational strategies,and give students specific guidance in the process of revision.Secondly,teachers should refine the task environment according to students’ real learning and living context,supplement relevant discourse knowledge according to the requirements of different writing tasks,guide students to use relevant organizational strategies to organize ideas,and give students clear,visual and operable guidance for revising activities.The significance of this research is embodied in the following two facets:First,this research can make a new attempt for the research on the writing activities in high school English textbooks.Second,this research can provide research basis and reference for textbook designers to improve textbook design and for teachers to adapt and use the textbooks flexibly and creatively.