A Study Of The TCT Approach To The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior High School

According to Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards (experimental), listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four skills students should develop during English learning. Besides, writing is an integrative reflection of the former three skills, which can objectively indicate students’comprehensive language ability. However, the present writing teaching methods is far from satisfactory, whose process is still remained as "topic-writing-correcting-comment". What’s more, little importance is attached to the input of the text. As a result, the writing teaching methods is quite ineffective, which prevents students from attaining the writing objectives required in the New English Curriculum Criterion in China.So this paper attempts to bring TCT (short for text, chunk and topic) English writing teaching approach into senior high schools. This approach is intended to form an effective writing teaching mode to improve students’ writing ability by studying intensively on text, chunk and topic.The study attaches importance to the following two aspects:1) Form TCT approach. There are mainly three steps during the TCT approach teaching process. First, enlarge students’ language input by reading the texts in the textbooks. Next, retrieve lexical chunks from the texts for training. Last, strengthen students’ language output through topic writing.2) Testify the effectiveness of TCT approach. This will be done by comparing the grades between the experimental class, adopting TCT approach, and control class, adopting traditional writing teaching approach.The subjects were 100 students in Senior Two from No.14 Senior High School in Wuhan. Two classes, class 5 and class 9, of the same proficiency in English writing were chosen as an experimental class and a control class. During the two and half months’instructional intervention, the teacher carried out the TCT writing approach in the experimental class while the control class traditional writing approach. Three instruments were used in the research: two questionnaires related to writing attitudes and the effectiveness of TCT approach; writing grades and the use of chunks of the mid-term examination and final term examination; an interview to the students after the experiment to learn more about their idea on the TCT approach.Then the author summarized the following things:First, TCT approach can better promote students’writing ability than traditional one. Secondly, TCT approach improved students’skills on their usage of chunks in both number and quality. Thirdly, TCT approach aroused learners’interest in English writing as well as let them realize the importance of text reading input to writing.The study is of great practical significance to high school English teaching of writing. It cultivated students’positive affects, embodied their subjective initiative, thus enabled students become the subject of learning, what’s more, TCT approach confirmed the importance of text reading input and chunks output, encouraged more teachers to pay equal attention to the teaching method of text reading and effective way of chunks output.