Research On Developing College Students’ EFL Writing Conception Through Experiential Teaching Approach

For college students, EFL writing is a very important skill and it is very hard tomaster. Although its importance has aroused the attention of the English teaching field,and various kinds of teaching methods have been tried in the teaching practice, thereare still some problems that cannot be ignored in the teaching of EFL writing. One ofthem is that the writings by students read empty and dull due to that traditional EFLwriting class laid too much stress on the correctness of grammar and the skills oftaking examinations, which inevitably made students ignore the importance of ideasin writing.In1984, an American experiential learning expert David Kolb put forwardExperiential Learning Theory, which systematically combed the educational ideologyof Dewey, Lewin and Piaget, absorbed the latest researches in philosophy, psychologyand physiology, and eventually formed an "Experiential Learning Circle". This paper,based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory and the analysis of the current situationof college students’ EFL writing conception, designed an experiential teachingapproach for EFL writing class, in which the teacher creates certain circumstances tohelp students reflect on their own experiences and bring the source of life into writing,so as to develop students’ writing conception skills. There are two research questionsin the study:1. what are the major problems in the process of conception whencollege students are composing EFL writings?2. What are the effects of experientialteaching approach on the conception of EFL writing?An experiment was made based on the two questions. The subjects aresophomores who were randomly chosen from two natural classes in a college inMudanjiang. A pretest had been made before the experiment to make sure that the twoclasses are of almost the same writing proficiency. Class7is the controlled groupwith27students; class9is the experimental group with29students. The controlledgroup was taught in the traditional approach, and the experiential group in theexperiential approach. After10teaching weeks, the students of the two groups weretested for their EFL writing conception level. The results were analyzed and it wasfound that the experimental group had made more significant improvement comparedwith the controlled group, which showed that the experiential teaching approach waseffective in improving students’ writing conception skills. Through the after-class talk,the effects brought about by the experiential approach are summarized as the following: students’ horizon in writing was broadened; their communicative abilitywas strengthened; their interest in writing was stimulated and what’s more, they fellinto the habit of profound thinking on the things around them. Thereby, we shouldre-examine the nature of writing and focus on the development of students’ writingconception skills in the teaching practice.