A Case Study Of Improving Senior High School Students’ English Writing Through Teacher- Student Writing Conference

Although teacher-student writing conference(hereafter referred to as writing conference) with English learners are considered to be valuable and efficient learning experiences, there is little research to show how face-to-face writing conference can benefit senior high school students in China. An empirical study in this thesis focuses on writing conference by using interview, observation, case study and grades comparison to collect data from students and teachers in Guangming Senior High School. The data source comes from two interviews, eight conferences and students’ writing grades in four monthly examinations for the purpose of combating the following two questions:1. how do the teacher and student play each role in the process of teacher-student writing conference? 2. To what extent does writing conference improve students’ English writing? As time is limited, in the analysis of conference discourse, two compositions of two students were picked and transcribed from Chinese into English.The results of the study suggest that both students and teachers prefer to writing conference due to strong pointedness and remarkable effects. Students have gradually made some progress in writing by analyzing conferences and grades comparison. However, some existing problems including limited time and personal reasons of students have always been obstacles for front-line teachers. Those findings to some extent highlight the fact that writing conference as an individualized instruction is a very effective method to improve students’ writing competence and also contributes to the research topic of how conferences benefit learners. This thesis nonetheless, has only analyzed two compositions and simply recorded four-month writing grades which led to certain limitation on diving deep into writing conferences. Therefore, more space is left to give deeper and wider studies on writing conferences. Hopefully, this study can provide some practical data for further study and offer some inspiration for English teachers to hold more successful writing conferences.