E-mail Exchange Between Native And Non-native Speakers: A Case Study In The Writing Class In No.41 Senior High School

The development of PC and Internet affords new opportunity for the writing of ESL. E-mail has been a new communication way in peoples' daily life. Can E-mail be a motivating means in English writing class? The presentpaper intends to gain insights into this problem. More specifically, the study aims to answer the following two questions:1) Does the application of E-mail in English writing class promote students' motivation in English writing?2) Does the application of E-mail in English writing class improve students' writing ability?During the past semester teaching, Class One Grade One in No.41 Senior High SchoII in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China were asked to exchange e-mails with native speakers who are Aviston Elementary school students in the 7th grade in Aviston, Illinois, USA on the assigned topics for intercultural understanding and language learning. The experiment class (Class One) has contrasted with the control class (Class Two) by English writing, which was analyzed to answer the two questions. Before the beginning of the experiment, all of the two classes' 85 students have had the examination to pre-test. At last, 85 students have also had the examination of writing at the end of the term to post-test. And a questionnaire survey was administrated to all the 85 students before the start of the project and after the end of the project. Both quantitative and qualitative data were obtained and analyzed. The findings shows that E-mail writing can help the students to overcome their shyness, gain confidence in their writing, enjoy a felling of success and initiate their motivation to write. E-mail is effective in improving the students' writing ability.As an exploration study, this study proves the feasibility of motivating students' writing competence in a whole. It is hoped that it will provide teachers with some ideas for developing their own activities in teaching and to promote the students' ability in writing. E-mail can/will never substitute teachers' role but they offer new opportunities for better language practice. They may actually make the process of English writing significantly richer. The next generation of students will fell a lot more confident with information technology than we do. As a result, they will also be able to use the Internet to communicate more effectively.