A Case Study Of Teaching English Writing Through Reading In The Senior High School

English teaching in current China’s senior high schools mainly focuses on the four basic English skills, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing, among which, the writing skill can well reflect the students’ comprehensive language ability and plays a vital and irreplaceable role in English learning. However, there still exist many problems in the English teaching in the senior high school, including the disconnection between teaching reading and teaching writing, and neglecting teaching writing. Most senior high school students are unable to meet the requirements in English writing competence and some even take a negative attitude towards English writing. Based on the relevant theories and the previous studies in teaching English writing, the author carried out a new teaching experiment in a senior high school. In the present experiment, the author adopted the method of teaching English writing through reading, putting great emphasis on the teaching of vocabulary, sentence structure and textual cohesion in reading, aiming to explore the effectiveness of teaching writing through reading and thus improving the senior high school students’ English writing competence.In the course of the present study, which lasts for one term, 84 Grade 1 students from two classes in a senior high school in Wujiang, Suzhou were chosen as the the subjects in the experiment. The students in the experimental class participated in the experiment of teaching English writing through reading, while the students in the control class were instructed with the traditional teaching method. The author applied three research methods in the experiment: the test, the questionnaire and the interview. The pre-test and post-test on English writing were conducted and the data were collected and analyzed. Besides, the two questionnaires were also carried out before and after the experiment to know about the change of the students’ writing competence and the interviews were conducted to know about the change of the students’ attitudes towards English writing.The results of the experiment indicate that the students in the experimental class have improved their writing competence after the one-term experimental teaching while the students in the control class have made less progress. In addition, it is shown that the method of teaching English writing through reading does play a positive role in the teaching of writing. Therefore, in the senior high school, it is necessary to apply the method of teaching English writing through reading and consciously strengthening vocabulary, sentence structure and textual cohesion in the daily teaching of English reading, which will be of great benefit to the improvement in the students’ writing competence.