An Empirical Study On The Process Approach To The English Writing Teaching

The process approach (PA) is an approach to the teaching of writing which directs students to work on multiple-drafts of a piece of writing before it receives the final evaluation from the teacher. Writing is seen as"a process of discovery which aims to raise students'awareness of the recursive nature of the composing process while allowing teacher and peer collaboration and intervention during the process as they negotiated meaning"(Susser, 1994; Reid, 1994).The present research was designed to investigate the effect of employing process approach in the writing class of Chinese college students. An experiment was carried out which involved 82 subjects of two classes from Hua Shang Independent College. The two classes were randomly assigned, one as the experimental class (EC) and the other controlled class (CC). Two different teaching approaches---the process approach and the product approach were employed to the two classes respectively. The independent variable is the PA and the dependent variables are the scores gained from the tests. This experiment lasted for 18 weeks. Results and the data collected from the experiment were analyzed. Specifically, the study addressed the following two questions:1) Is the PA helpful in changing the students'attitudes and beliefs towards writing? If it is, what effect does the PA produce?2) In what way can PA be effective in improving the students'writing proficiency? With the intention of answering the two research questions scientifically, the experiment was designed carefully into three phases.In the first phase, a pretest was held to prove the assumption that the subjects of the both classes were on the same level of writing proficiency, followed by a questionnaire which was distributed to the students in EC in order to get the general information about their attitudes and beliefs towards writing.Then, students in the EC accomplished 5 writing tasks by adopting the process approach in the class; while students in the CC were required to compose 5 writing tasks under the traditional instruction method.A posttest was held after the second phase in order to further test the effect of employing PA in the writing class. A second questionnaire was distributed to the students in the EC, together with a sample-interview which were conducted with 10 subjects of this class, which was used to get more detailed information about the students'attitudes towards writing and the writing course employed PA in the experiment.Through detailed analysis of the collected data, and by employing the statistic software package SPSS 11.5, the following conclusions can be arrived at:1) By implementing PA in the writing class, which was accepted by most of the subjects according to the result of the post-experiment questionnaire and the interview, students were highly motivated, and their interests in writing have been improved. As a result, students'attitudes towards writing changed positively;2) Increasingly enriched content was the most obvious improvement in the subjects'writing. There were less positive change in the other two aspects as in organization and language accuracy, in which similar performance were manifested by subjects from the two classes.The empirical way of the experiment was assumed to offer some useful implications for the further researches, though, there existed some uncontrolled factors and limitations.In conclusion, the PA provides a practical method for the teaching of English writing, which can be applied in the specific Chinese EFL classrooms with proper modification.