An Empirical Study Of Reading-to-Writing Approach In Senior English Writing

In the four basic skills, English writing is the most difficult language skills for the students to master expertly. It is also the weakest part among senior high students. Due to there are a lot of problems in English writing,improving senior high school students' English writing has become an important task for English educator in China. They devoted themselves to finding scientific and effective teaching method in order to improve the current situation of English writing teaching. According to Krashen's comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Swain's comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Schema Theory, combining the practical teaching experiment, the researcher put forward Reading-to-Writing Approach teaching method.Three questions to be discussed in this study are as follows:1. What effect does Reading-to-Writing Approach have on English writing in terms of content, organization and language proficiency in senior high school?2. What effect does Reading-to-Writing Approach have on different groups(i.e. high-score, low-score) in senior high school?3. Can Reading-to-Writing Approach change the senior high students' attitudes and arouse their interests in English writing?The subjects of this research were 104 students in two natural classes in Senior One in Hohhot Railway No.2 Senior School as well as the researchherself. Research instruments are interview and two writing tests. The two writing tests were the compositions of the mid-term English examination and the final-term English examination organized by Hohhot Railway No.2Senior School. Due to the challenging teaching task and limited teaching time, the researcher used the reading parts in book 2 as the reading materials between the writing tests, conducting two-month Reading-to-Writing Approach research. The researcher, with the help of her colleagues,collected all the data.There were three steps in the pre-test and the post-test each. Step one was that the researcher collected all compositions; step two was that the researcher and her colleagues scored all the compositions of the two tests according to the same analytic rating criterion by Cohen(2005); step three was to use SPSS to analyze the data on the students' composition.According to the results of the experiment, we can draw the conclusion that Reading-to-Writing Approach is an effective way of improving high school students' writing ability. From the analysis of the data in the experiment, we can come to the following conclusions:(1). The data in the experiment indicated that Reading-to-Writing Approach was an effective writing teaching approach.(2). By comparing of the pre-test with post-test, the data in the experiment showed that students in EC performed better in content,organization and language than the students in CC.(3). The comparison of the high-score and low-score groups in the pre-test as well as in the post-test indicated that they all had progresses; but low-scores improved more than the high-scores.(4). The interview on Reading-to-Writing Approach made clear that this approach has changed students' attitudes and aroused their interests in English writing.