An Empirical Study On The Effect Of The Length Approach On Senior High School English Writing

English writing, as one of productive skills and communication ways of students’ language, is an essential aspect in English learning and teaching. However, writing teaching has always been considered as“bottleneck” in foreign language teaching. For many years, researchers have devoted themselves to find out effective ways to solve this problem and many approaches have been put forward, such as product approach, process approach and genre approach etc. To some extent, these approaches have improved students’ writing proficiency. However, the current situation of college students’ English writing performance in China is still far from satisfactory. A majority of students lack enthusiasm and are not interested in writing. Given problems existing in English writing, it is urgent to find out new effective ways so as to comprehensively improve students’ writing ability.Recently, a new approach-LA, based on some important L2 theories as well as the insightful analyses of the situation of writing teaching in China, was initiated by Professor Wang Chuming. The basic assumption of this new approach is that the teacher constantly adjusts the writing requirements on the basis of students’ current level of foreign language.Through gradually increasing the number of words in composition, students are encouraged to write increasingly long compositions so as to strengthen their sense of achievement, enhance their confidence in their ability to learn foreign language, stimulate further learning and eventually ensure progress in foreign language learning. This new approach has attracted great attention both at home and abroad. The current study, on the basis of the previous researches, aims to investigate the feasibility and validity of applying LA to high school English writing teaching, hoping to change the current situation in writing field and improve students’ writing confidence and proficiency of their English. 80 students coming from two parallel classes of high school in Minghu school in Taian participated in this research. By employing instruments containing two English writing tests, two questionnaires and SPSS(Statistical Program for Social Science17.0), this thesis adopted quantitative and qualitative analysis methods in order to answer the following research questions:1.Can the application of the length approach help senior high school students develop their self-confidence in their English writing?2. Can the application the length approach in English writing help senior high school students improve their writing proficiency in their English writing ?After fourteen weeks’ experiment, the author comes to the conclusion as follows:1) With first-hand data, the present study proves the hypotheses suggested in the first chapter that to a great extent, Length Approach can highly improve high school English learners’ self confidence in their English writing. That is to say, after the Length approach, students feel more confident to write their compositions.2) The study shows that Length Approach can boost high students’ English proficiency in their English writing. Length Approach is a feasible and effective method in teaching EFL, for writing long composition can increase students’ output practice, and this strategy can raise the learner’s consciousness to production level. In this way, comprehension and production are combined, and input is more deeply processed to become intake and output. Writing now is an outlet for learners to improve their English proficiency.After writing training, students’ attitudes towards English writing have shifted from negative to positive. They become more confident in English writing. All these contribute to students’ higher writing proficiency, which can verify the feasibility of applying LA to high school English writing teaching.