The Study Of Development Of Senior High School Students’ Writing: A Complexity Theory Perspective

English writing is a process for students to express their thoughts by applying the language knowledge they have mastered before,and it is also a reflection of their ability to use language.However,in the existing English teaching in China,writing teaching is still a relatively weak part.Especially,the English writing teaching in senior high school mostly adopt the Product-oriented teaching mode,which ignores the development process of students’ writing ability.In addition,the measurement of English writing ability also focuses on the horizontal research of a certain dimension.How to study the development of students’ English writing ability from a new perspective is also a problem that teachers need to think about at present.Complexity theory regards writing ability as a constantly developing complex system,which is composed of multiple subsystems,such as vocabulary and grammar,and the development of a single subsystem cannot represent the development of writing ability.Complexity theory undoubtedly provides a new perspective for the study of the development of English writing ability.In view of this,this study attempts to take the complex theory as the theoretical basis.By means of empirical research,this paper explores the dynamic development process of senior high school students’ English writing in terms of complexity and accuracy,and then discusses the characteristics of their English writing ability development and changes,so as to provide some ideas and methods of reference value and reference significance for English writing teaching in high schools in China.In this study,eight students from a high school in Chongqing were selected as the observation objects for a dynamic case study.The learners were given a 30-minute writing test on different writing topics once a week.Corpus collected for one semester(15 weeks)and a total of 120 writing corpus were collected.By using corpus-based analysis tool CLAN and SPSS22.0 statistical tool,this paper presents the dynamic development trajectory of six specific indicators in writing complexity and accuracy of learners’ English writing,and summarizes the fixed pattern and variation of students’ writing ability development by using qualitative and quantitative method.This paper mainly studies the following three questions:1.What is the overall development trajectory of students’ writing complexity and accuracy?2.Do the development of complexity and accuracy have regular or dynamic patterns?3.What is the development trajectory of writing complexity and accuracy for individual students? How is it different from the overall trajectory?The result shows that the writing ability of high school students is a complex system,and its development process is a tortuous change.As a whole,students’ writing ability shows a linear upward trend,but the individual writing development track of students is different.Different students’ writing complexity and accuracy show a nonlinear form of development.Students’ actual writing expression shows some progressive fixed pattern and variation.