A Study On Application Of The Length Approach In High Middle School English Teaching

The Length Approach (LA) first proposed by Wang Chuming (2000) is a new type of writing-teachingmethod, which is an important development of Swain's comprehensible output theory in China. It provesthat comprehensible output theory has a great significance to China's second language teaching andlearning, as well as it finds a new efficient way for China's writing-teaching. In China, although studentshave a lot of reading and listening practice, they lack proper language output. The LA emphasizes thelanguage output through writing. It aims at increasing students' confidence in writing and further improvingtheir writing abilities.Li Li has made a further study about the LA in2004and confirmed that the LA can be used in highmiddle school. This thesis is aimed to discuss about the following two questions:Q1: Can the LA help students in grade one to achieve higher results in their writing test?Q2: What changes does LA bring to students in EFL learning?This study takes132students from two classes in grade one in Anyang Number2high middle schoolas the research subject The experiment uses the two group pretest-posttest method, and two tests and twoquestionnaires are employed to find out the effect of applying the LA to high middle school students. TheSPSS17.0is used to analyze all the collected data of the tests and questionnaires. The results of the testsshow that56students in the experiment group get the higher marks in writing test after three months'experiment than those in the controlled group. According to the comparison of the results of the twoquestionnaires, the author finds that students' attitudes towards the LA have changed and students'confidence in writing has improved. The author realizes that the students' English proficiency can beimproved through more language output; therefore teachers should change their traditional roles and try toprovide more opportunities for students to increase language output. Except that, the teacher should thinkof more ways to increase students' confidence and try their best to help the students solve the problems andimprove the approach.Five chapters make up of this thesis. The first chapter is an introduction. It mainly introduces thewhole thesis. Chapter two is a literature review, which mainly introduces the brief review of the theoretical basis of the LA----the Output Hypothesis, and the main content of the LA. The third part is the experimentstudy of the LA. Chapter four mainly introduces the results of the experiment and discussion. This chapteranalyzes the date which is collected from the two tests and the questionnaires. Chapter five is theconclusion of the whole thesis. It will show the conclusion and also the implication of the study.