An Empirical Study Of Teaching College English Writing With Length Approach-Based On Meta-cognitive Strategy Instruction

Since the Length Approach (LA) was proposed in 2000 by Wang Chuming, Professor of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, it has received great attention in the field of English teaching. Especially in recent years, more and more researchers have embarked on the research to identify the effect of the LA to Chinese students'English learning. Almost all their findings proved that the LA is consistent with the national conditions of China and its new teaching philosophies—"write-to-learn", quantity promoting quality and appreciate-to-encourage, which has an obvious positive effect on promoting the students'writing and overall English proficiency. However, some common problems in English writing have been found in the implementation process of LA. They are small vocabulary, weak foundation on grammar, too many simple sentences, few sentence variety, poor logic of paragraphs and the whole article, poor and rigid ideas, negative impact of Chinese thinking, etc.Inspired by the LA, this study tries to integrate the meta-cognitive strategy training into the LA instruction to guarantee the implementation of LA out of class successfully and improve the writing ability and overall English proficiency of EFL students. Meta-cognition is a concept initiated by John Flavell in the 1970s of the 20th Century. He holds that meta-cognition is"thinking about thinking". It is the knowledge about individual cognitive process and the ability to modify this process. Meta-cognition is a higher level process of thinking which controls the whole cognitive process of our learning. The integration of meta-cognitive theory into English writing, namely, through the training of meta-cognitive awareness in the class and under the teacher's guidance of meta-cognitive strategy use, students'motivation on learning can be inspired and their autonomous learning ability such as planning, selective attention, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation can all be improved.The subjects of this study are non-English majored freshmen from Shanxi Normal University. Forty students from one natural class were grouped as the experimental group (EG) and forty students of the other natural class were selected as control group (CG). Both groups were instructed with the LA for 15 weeks, and the EG took the meta-cognitive strategy training for 15 weeks in the same term. Data was collected and then analyzed by SPSS11.5. The results of this experimental study indicate: (1) LA writing practice can really improve the writing proficiency and overall English proficiency of EFL students. (2) Meta-cognitive strategy training has a significant impact on the LA writing. The students being trained with meta-cognitive strategies perform better than those without training (the weekly composition scores show the difference). (3) Students without taking training on meta-cognitive strategies made some prominent mistakes such as small vocabulary, grammar errors, too simple sentences, few sentence variety, and negative impact of Chinese thinking, etc.In the light of this study,"Length Approach"is proved an effective way on English writing improvement. Its publishing is liberation of thoughts and innovation of ideas. Yet the LA would undoubtedly achieve better performance in the actual implementation when it combines with meta-cognitive strategy training.