| For most senior high school students, writing is regarded as the most difficult task among all the four language skills. In a survey conducted in the writer's class as well. More than 60 out of 100 students put writing at the first three places.The new curriculum for senior high English teaching published and put into practice in 2003, compared with the version in 1993, lays out more specific and detailed requirements in teaching and learning writing. The major changes, or the improvements can be summarized as follows. First, the style ranges are widened. Besides the narrative stories, students are supposed to fill in firms, rewrite plays, express argumentative ideas, etc. Second, the requirements for writing skills are improved as well. More attention should be paid to coherence, unity, logic, sentence variety, word choice, transition, etc. The last, but not the least, is that revision, edition and evaluation are for the first time listed as important strategies in learning and teaching writing.Resulting form the higher requirements in curriculum, the count of writing in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) has been raised from 25 of 150 (1993-2001) to 35 of 150 (2002 until now). The score scale is revised as well.Contrast to the improved requirements in both teaching curriculum and the NMET, teachers in senior high school have not acquired adequate strategies in teaching writing. This problem also confronts the writer and her colleagues, who are working in a key school in the suburbs in Beijing.Based on theories of cooperative learning and revision, peer revision is... |
