An Investigation On English Writing Teaching In The Middle Schools In Heze, Shandong Province

With English more and more widely used in social communication, writing, as one of the four basic skills of language teaching and an aspect of communicative competence, has drawn more and more attention in the EFL circles. Compared with the status that writing had in English teaching, the teaching of writing and the development of writing abilities have become important trends in present education. In spite of many empirical articles on how to improve middle-school students writing ability, the importance of English writing has not received the attention to its merits and the teaching of writing still remains a neglected area in many middle schools.This thesis tried to expound the significance of English writing teaching at middle school from different standpoints and to make a preliminary investigation into the present situation of writing teaching in middle schools through questionnaire, interview and classroom observation conducted among teachers and students from two schools in Heze, Shandong Province. Based on the results of investigation, the thesis reveals some inadequacies of English writing teaching at middle schools, including ineffective teaching approaches and less writing strategy training. The aim is to arouse the interest of the students and teachers to writing to improve the current writing situation. Although there are only two schools in the survey, it shows certain problems.The investigation is directed to the following questions:1) How do middle school teachers regard English writing teaching and writing strategy in different schools?2) What approaches are adopted in teaching writing? Do the teachers conduct writing strategy training or not?3) How do middle-school students regard writing lessons in different schools? How are the writing abilities of students in different schools?In this study, two schools were drawn as a sample from the middle schools in Heze, Shandong Province. 40 English teachers from the sample attended the questionnaire survey and accepted the interview. 240 students of Grade 9 attended the questionnaire survey. According to the data, some results of the present situation on writing teaching were obtained as following:In general, English teachers think that English writing is hard to teach and they do not realize the importance of teaching writing.Most of the teachers use the traditional product method and lack the knowledge of process method.The middle school teachers confuse writing strategies and have less confidence about their own writing strategies. Besides, only a few teachers use writing strategies in class but they can not teach English writing systematically.At the same time, the results from the students questionnaire are: they are not interested in the writing and lack the relative writing strategies, and writing ability is low.