Developing Senior Secondary School Students' English Writing Competence By Reading Newspapers

Writing has been taken as one of the four fundamental skills in English learning. However, the English writing ability of senior secondary school students in China has long been weak. In order to change this situation, many scholars have done a lot of researches on the theoretical and pedagogic aspects of this area. With an attempt to solve the problems of senior secondary school students in English writing, this study focuses on exploring the possibility of utilizing English newspaper reading (ENR) in English writing classes to develop students' English writing skills.In this study, an experiment is designed. 90 Senior-One students in two classes of a secondary school in Fujian's Quanzhou city were chosen as experimental subjects during the school year. One class were assigned as the experimental class and the other as the regular controlled class . The data collected from the questionnaire,pretest and posttest were analyzed through Statistic Description and Independent-samples T-tests in SPSS 11.0.The following are the major findings inferred from the statistics : 1) The ENR activities were enthusiastically accepted by the students in the experimental class with great interest both in reading and writing. 2) The ENR activities could help the students in the experimental class to learn English vocabulary more effectively. 3) The ENR activities enabled the students in the experimental class to significantly performed better than those in the controlled class. Great insight into English language teaching in secondary schools has been gained , which will benefit both the teaching of reading and writing. First, a great quantity of authentic language input proves effective for developing students'English proficiency. So it's necessary for teachers to substantially increase such input in English language teaching. Second, the integration of ENR has also proved effective for developing students' English writing ability. It is expected to strengthen the integration of the teaching of reading and writing. Third, the adoption of English newspaper reading can maximize the function of writing classes. It is advisable to do further research on this approach.