An Empirical Study On The Discourse-based Reading-to-Write Approach In Middle School English Writing Teaching

Writing is one of the four skills in the process of learning English.By virtue of its importance,the teaching of English writing has been referred to as an integral part of English teaching in middle schools of China.The reason why emphasis is laid on writing teaching is that English writing not only enables students to apply language knowledge into practice but also enhances students' skills and cultivates their interest in learning English.Unfortunately,the current situation of writing teaching in middle schools,in essence,is not far from satisfactory at all.Actually,it is kind of difficult for learners at this stage to write a passage in English and what is more,cohesion,coherence and organization,important discourse devices,are largely absent in their knowledge structure and thus disregarded in their process of composing a piece of writing.Reading and writing,in reality,interact with each other in the learning process and reading can in theory,lay a foundation on writing for its imperative input for writing.This paper aims to study how teaching reading,especially by equipping students with necessary discourse knowledge,can effectively contribute to the betterment of their writing.The research was done with 76 students in Grade 8 from a middle school in Hangzhou.The experiment lasts 10 weeks.They were from two parallel teaching classes taught by the same English teacher and they randomly assigned to two groups.And during the course of the experiment,reading-to-write approach was carried out in the experimental class(Class 3)while the control class(Class 4)was conducted in the normal teaching routine.The empirical study attempts to answer the following questions:1)What's the correlation between writing competence and reading competence?2)Whether the reading-to-write approach based on discourse knowledge can help to improve middle school students' writing skills?3)What influence does reading-to-write approach have on writing competence,especially on discourse level?The study consists of the following steps.First and foremost,the author devised a questionnaire that was about the situation of reading and writing of middle school students and got the students to complete the questionnaire.Then,the analysis is made of the possible correlation of reading and writing competence of the group students.After the teaching experiment,the discussion of the research question was conducted about that whether the reading-to-write approach is an effective way to enhance learners' writing skills.Lastly,the effects on discourse level were analyzed by the author after the experiment was completed.The two major findings are: 1)reading-to-write approach is conducive to the improvement of English writing competence of middle school students.The participants in experimental group who are under the guidance of reading-to-write manage to make an evident progress in writing and they can learn a lot from reading texts and apply what they have grasped into writing;2)the approach offers students an access to more discourse knowledge including organization,structure and coherence,which improves their compositions in discourse level.Compared with students in the control group,the students in the experimental group not only do better in applying complex grammatical structure and more vocabulary,they also have more advantages in discourse level reflected in compositions.Finally,the conclusion can be drawn that writing should combined with reading to reach the teaching goal of improving writing competence as well as promoting discourse level.And a more effective approach of English teaching named reading-to-write is advocated by the author for middle school students.