Applying Reading-to-write In EFL Writing Teaching In A Senior Middle School

In EFL teaching, writing teaching has become one of the main concerns in senior middle school. It has experienced dramatic changes in the last two decades, and resulting in many important studies either at home or abroad. However, in China, especially in senior middle schools, writing teaching is neglected and little has been done with it. Though more and more teachers have already realized the importance of writing both in individual development and in English teaching and learning, still EFL writing is the one that calls for more attention and further studies (especially empirical ones).Writing, a highly complex, goal-directed, recursive activity, for Chinese middle school students, it is also a process in which thoughts in Chinese are expressed in English. When writing, students should have two kinds of knowledge: substantive knowledge and formal knowledge. Formal knowledge is by far more important than substantive. Therefore, it is worth of exploring how to make students acquire the knowledge (especially formal knowledge) and apply it in writing in writing class.The thesis is an empirical study of reading-to-write approach. It advocates possibly a more practical and effective way of English writing teaching approach for senior middle schools. Reading in the present study refers to a purposeful activity prior to writing activity, different from reading in the reading class. It can be argued that the reading-to-write approach which aims to foster students' writing ability is appropriate for middle school students if they are provided with purposefully-selected reading materials. The study attempts to examine the effectiveness of the approach. More particularly, the present study endeavors to answer the following research questions:1) Is reading-to-write an effective writing teaching approach in senior middle school?2) If so, what effects it brings for EFL writing in senior middle school?The participants were 123 students in senior Two from a senior middle school, in Longnan, Gansu Province. During four-month instructional intervention, the teacher carried out reading-to-write approach to teach writing in the experimental class. The major findings were presented as follows:1) Students' writing ability in EG was improved more than that of students in CG, which indicated that the teaching approach—reading-to-write is more effective than the common teaching approach. Thus we might conclude that our experimental methodology could help students improve their EFL writing.2) The results of the post-test writing papers showed that students in EG performed better in text structure. More complex and longer sentences were found in their writings. Meanwhile, they were able to express their thoughts in a clearer way.3) The results also suggested that reading-to-write approach can reduce the number of Chinglish sentences in students' writing, which implies that students are less dependant upon their mother tongue in English writing. But it is still not clear whether it can improve students' English thinking in EFL writing.The overall results suggested that reading-to-write approach is likely to help students improve their writing ability in particular, and language proficiency in general.The implications from the study are that writing can be taught through reading, and writing can be integrated with reading to maximize the possibility of using information acquired from reading. Reading-to-write approach is an appropriate teaching method for senior middle school students. However, it has to be admitted that reading-to-write is not a panacea which can solve all the problems in writing teaching.Though the experiment has been finished as it is planned, the present study can not avoid the following limitations :1) the effect of students' English proficiency upon the results is not well controlled; 2) as writing can not make progress without long period training ,the reliability of the data collected from four-month teaching has to be testified in future studies; 3) in study only narrative ones are selected to read, so it can not answer whether other kinds of reading materials have same influences upon students' writing.The present study is a pretest-posttest, non-equivalent quasi-experiment, which consists of 6 chapters. In chapter 1, a brief introduction and the research rationale is given. In chapter 2, research on L2/EFL writing instruction and reading and writing are reviewed, and so is reading-to-write. In chapter 3, the theoretical foundations of the research are presented. In chapter 4, the methodology employed in the experiment is introduced. In chapter 5, data collection and analysis are presented. In chapter 6, conclusions are drawn and some further suggestions are put forward.