A Survey Of The English Writing Ability Of Senior High School Students

English is one of the world’s most widely used languages, which is the medium ofcommunication in many international occasions. Also, it has become an indispensablebridge in the continuous process of China’s integration with the whole world both insocial life and economic activities. At present, China has begun popularizing Englisheducation at the primary stage; for middle school students, English is an importantcompulsory course which is recognized by both teachers and students, and itsachievements will affect the guidance of students to some extent.The ultimate goal of learning English is to communicate, and the written expressionis one kind of communications. This form is one of the important ways for students tocommunicate during their process of learning this course, and writing is strict with theaccuracy of wording, spelling, syntax and punctuation regardless of the length of thearticle. And the students are required to properly organize the materials to achieve fulltext focused, clear thinking and logical consistency. What the students write could fullyreflect the level of the students’ English proficiency. Compared with the past, theteaching of English writing and cultivating students’ ability of English writing havebecome a trend. In the College Entrance Examination, the English writing scores accountfor nearly a quarter of the total score of the English paper, showing how significantimpact the English writing will be on a student’s achievements in English entrance.However, to write in English is a more complex process of language output as animportant practical course. To master this process is not so easy for many high schoolstudents and their writing ability varies. In the teaching process, teachers will inevitablyencounter a variety of students’ writing errors, such as spelling errors, word choice bias, Chinglish, rules and layout improper and so on. But the students’ writing competency canstill be greatly improved through proper guidance of teachers and the students’ own closecoordination. Hence, what kind of obstacles high school students often encounter exactlywhen they are doing writing exercises, and how could teachers help students withimproving their writing ability? These questions have been the hot issue discussed inforeign language teaching, and those have been emphasized by more and more teachers.At present, China’s survey on the current situation of high school students’ Englishwriting are mostly focusing on the teaching strategies from the macro aspects. Althoughdiscussions on how to improve the students’ writing ability are common, many teachersactually ignore it in the process of teaching English. This issue does not get its dueattention. To know the status of high school students’ English writing ability and find outthe barriers in their writing process, this article is intended to summarize and presentcertain practical problems by carrying out a survey to high school students of Xi’anNo.86Middle School based on certain relevant theory at home and abroad, hoping tofind effective teaching strategies to eliminate the barriers of students in English writing.There are five parts in this article:The first part is an introduction. This part introduces the background of the research,illustrating the necessity of this research from both the research background and theresearch significance.The second part gives a literature review. The relevant theoretic concepts of“writing”,“writing ability” and “writing strategy” are introduced in part two, and thestatus of the research for English writing ability at home and abroad are analyzed.The third part is research design. This design shows how this survey to clear theresearch purposes, target the research objects, determine the research methods and collectdata according to the actual situation of the survey.The fourth part is the results of the survey and analysis. By data collection andstatistical analysis, the status of high school students’ English writing ability will bepresented comprehensively. And the main difficulties in the process of high schoolstudents’ English writing will be summarized according to the statistical analysis of thedata.The fifth part comes to the conclusion. This section summarizes the above. And the possible factors that may lead to the obstacles in the process of high school students’English writing are concluded. Then this part tentatively presents some suggestions abouthow to effectively help high school students improve their English writing ability. In theend of this article, the deficiencies of this research are summed up.