Application Of Activity-based Approach To Teaching Writing In Senior High School

For a long time, teachers in the secondary school have been adopting traditional teaching method, which is owing to the heavy burden of the teaching and learning tasks, leading to the students losing learning interests gradually. Therefore, the students’writing abilities remain unchanged, unable to apply the newly-learned words and phrases. The situation challenges English teaching in secondary school and calls for a profound reform.According to the activity-based approach, teaching is defined as work, involving students in activities to acquire language during the process of practicing. The essential characteristic of the activity-based approach is learner-centeredness, which promotes the students to involve, to explore, to think and to practice actively. Taking the present writing teaching situation and the characteristics of activity-based approach into consideration, the author tries to apply this approach to the teaching of English writing and to investigate whether activity-based approach is more effective than traditional teaching method in improving students’ competence of applying the new words and writing ability.In order to identify the effectiveness in practical teaching and the popularity of the new approach, an experimental study was carried out within one term among the students from two classes (Class 13 and Class 15) of Senior Two from Zhenchuan High School in Kunshan. During the experiment, Class 15 with 38 students as the experimental class received activity-based approach combined with traditional teaching method while Class 13 with 42 students as the control class were taught with traditional teaching method.The study gets the effective data and feedback through questionnaires and writing tests, which are responsible for the two questions:(1) whether the application of the activity-based approach has a good effect on improving students’ writing abilities. (2) whether the activity-based approach can stimulate students’ motivation and interest in English learning and whether it is popular among the students in the experimental class.The results and analysis of the data from the study indicate activity-based approach can improve the learners’ writing abilities effectively. Meanwhile, it increases the learners’ motivation and interest in English learning compared with the traditional teaching method.