A Study On The Application Of Writing-to-learn In Junior High School English Teaching

Most students hardly have opportunity to apply writing in their daily life in China. Therefore, teachers should create more chances for them to use English to help them learn English well. There are many educators and researchers have performed a cluster of teaching and learning approaches. These approaches mostly focused on listening, speaking, and reading, but few on writing.Many educators have advocated that writing is a mode of learning, and learning can improve writing. It can be referred from Emig‘s study on the process of writing. He claimed that writing represented a unique mode of learning, and writing can gain a group of attentions corresponding to a certain effective learning method. In China, the study of writing-to-learn in foreign language teaching and learning was attributed to Wang Chuming who claimed that writing longer can improve students‘ English learning competence. Based on his study, many researchers have carried out experiments among college students and senior school students with Length-Approach. Reports have shown that writing-to-learn can promote foreign language learning and teaching for college and high school students. However, there were few studies that refer to junior middle school students.Length-Approach has been applied in universities in China for years, and it attracted to the wide English researchers because of its great prosperity. Activities for English speaking tend to be contextualized, meaningful, and personalized. The present thesis aims to study the application of writing-to-learn during English teaching in junior middle schools. According to Swain‘s theory, this study attempts to apply writing-to-learn to English teaching in order to improve the present complexion of low efficiency and time consuming in junior high schools. In this thesis there are two questions are addressed:1. Does writing-to-learn improve the writing competence of junior middle students?2. Does writing-to-learn effectively improve the score of junior middle school English examination( exclude listening part)?The participants of this study were selected from the Grade 9 of Hua Qiao Middle School. These participants were divided into two groups: the experimental group, and the control group. Writing-to-learn was applied in the experimental group while the traditional teaching method was used in the control group. Data collection involved both scores of pretest and posttest. Data analysis was done by SPSS17.0. According to experiment and analysis, the research questions were answered, and some insights and implications of English teaching and learning were concluded. The study demonstrated that writing-to-learn had great value in improving junior middle school students‘ ability of English learning.In the thesis, the findings involve the design of the writing task, requiring of the length of writing, and the notification of the process of writing. The implication is that students should be centered in the class. And also teachers should help students increase their self-confidence to learn English well.