The Application Of Experiential Teaching To Senior High English Writing

English writing plays an important role in high school language teaching and can also reflect students’ overall English learning ability. However, in practice, teachers pay more attention to examination-oriented techniques and writing patterns; ignore students’ experience and self perception in writing. This leads to the result that students become powerless and have no idea to make in face of writing so that they have to finish the writing tasks carelessly and hastily. Thus the students’ writing ability is not able to meet the requirements of the new English curriculum standards as well as the college entrance exam syllabus.Experiential teaching refers to a kind of teaching model, in which students are exposed to a pre-set or simulated situation aiming at inspiring their interest and previous real-life experiences and gain the perception and knowledge. Experiential teaching emphasizes on the importance of students’ experiential comprehension, activating students’ previous experience as well as students’ writing enthusiasm and invoking their effective resonance to participate in the English writing tasks actively.This paper, by means of consulting and reviewing the relevant literature on experiential teaching and English writing both at home and abroad, summarizes the fundamental concepts and main views of experiential teaching, analyzes the current situation of English writing teaching in senior high schools, investigates the necessity and feasibility of the application of experiential teaching, and puts forward a tentative teaching model based on the experiential teaching theory.Three research questions are put forward: 1. what is the current situation of English writing in high schools? 2. Whether can the experiential teaching improve students’ actual English writing ability? 3. What is students’ attitude towards experiential teaching applied in English writing? The research adopts a quasi-experimental design, where the experimental class uses experiential teaching while the control class the conventional teaching. Both questionnaires and writing tests are conducted before and after the teaching experiment. By comparing and analyzing the data collected before and after the experiment, it is found that(1) the current situation of students’ writing ability is that they know the basic writing skills but cannot use these skills properly and correctly, that(2) the experimental class made much progress in English writing than the control class after a four-month writing training and that(3)students think highly of the application of experiential teaching in senior high school English writing.Therefore, the application of experiential teaching in senior high school English writing can effectively solve the current problems in senior high school English writing, and improve the students’ writing ability in English. The tentative teaching model not only has practical significance in present English writing, but also provides a theoretical basis for the application of experiential teaching theory in senior high school English teaching.