Teaching English-Writing In Vocational College Via The Lengrh Approach

Writing, as one of the main basic skills of learning English, can reflect how well a language learnercan use the language. As a new teaching idea of writing, Length Approach requires students to write along essay by constantly improve their English writing skills, thus contribute to the English learning,improve their self-confidence. Length Approach was initiated by Wang Chuming in 2000, and then hasbeen put into practice in several universities and proved it is a successful new teaching method forhelping students improves their language ability as well as writing, but it was seldom used in vocationalcolleges currently. The study tries to introduce the approach into a vocational college and prove that itcan also benefit the students there by improving the confidence and writing skills, forming a good habitof learning English.Length Approach is based on Swain's output comprehensible theory. This paper first describesrelated theories of Length Approach, and also discusses the current research status. Then introduce theprocedure in this experiment, the specific research methods. The subjects are 104 sophomores majoringin Economic Management in two classes, from Shanxi Traffic Vocational and Technical College.Forty-two of them formed the Experimental Group (EG), given writing long composition practice. Theother forty-two students served as the Controlled Group (CG), receiving conventional teaching methodswithout Length Approach. All the other conditions of these two groups were similar: the same teacher,teaching materials and length of class time. The data was collected from the two exams. Throughstatistic analysis of students'scores of compositions from the pretest and the posttest, the authorattempts to test the effectiveness of Length Approach to vocational college English writing.The study continued for a semester. Through the data analysis after the experiment showed that theexperimental class, with Length Approach, made a significant progress and a better grade than that ofthe controlled class, with conventional teaching methods. Through interviews found that the writingabilities, confidence and interest in learning English of the experimental class are better than that of thecontrolled classes. It shows that Length Approach played a positive role in promoting writing skills ofnon-key vocational college students. Therefore, in spite of the limitations in the range of subjects andtime span, Length Approach is still a good method of teaching writing in training non-key vocationalcollege students'writing ability and confidence.