An Empirical Study On The Application Of Reading-to-write Strategies To English Writing In A Senior High School

In EFL teaching, writing is one of the basic skills in learning a foreign language. It can directly reflect the process in which thoughts in Chinese are expressed in English, and test the students’comprehensive competence to use the language. Studies on writing abound both at home and abroad, but most of them are limited to advanced level learners. Few such empirical studies focus on how lower level learners acquire writing.Thus, based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis, the study tries, from the perspective of the integration of reading and writing, to explore the effects of reading-to-write teaching strategies on senior high students’English writing, answering two specific questions:(1) What effects does the application of reading-to-write teaching strategies have on senior high students’English writing?(2)What are the students’attitudes towards different reading-to-write teaching strategies?To answer the two questions,108Grade Two students from Ningxiang No.1Senior High School were asked to participate in this four-month experiment, during which different reading-to-write teaching strategies (i.e., imitation, abbreviation, expansion) were adopted. After the experiment, a questionnaire survey was conducted to collect the data concerning the students’attitudes towards the use of these three strategies.Results show that the application of reading-to-write strategies can enhance the students’overall writing ability significantly. They performed best in applying the newly learned expressions and conjunctions, followed by the use of complex sentences and discourse organization. However, no significance was identified in terms of grammar. Questionnaire results show that students preferred the imitation in classroom learning, but in after-class exercises, better learners preferred the expansion, while the underachievers liked imitation better.Given the limited sample and time, this thesis still has some shortcomings.