An Empirical Research On Improving Junior High School Students' English Writing Ability Through Theme-based Extensive Reading

Writing plays an important role in English communicative ability. While in English teaching in China, teachers always spend too much time teaching grammar and reading. Less time is spent on writing, especially in junior high schools. As the writing task is always simple in junior high schools, teachers pay more attention to grammar mistakes than the structure and fluency of the composition. Thus, the compositions the students write are often lack of rigorous logic of thinking. The structure of them is not complete and the language of them is not smooth as they always think in Chinese. So it is necessity for our teachers to find out a more acceptable and efficient way for junior high school students to improve their English writing ability.This research, which is based on the theories of Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis, targets at solving the problems in English writing teaching in junior high schools. It attempts to collect empirical evidence for positive effect of Reading to Write approach on improving junior high school students' writing ability through theme-based extensive reading. The study tries to answer the following two research questions:1) Is theme-based extensive reading effective in improving junior high school students' writing ability?2) Which aspect of the students' writing(the integrity of content, the accuracy and richness of language and language coherence) does this Reading to Write approach affect the most and which does it affect the least?To find out the answers to the questions, 64 Junior Nine students who were taught by the writer from Guangzhou No.13 Middle School participated in this three-month experiment. Before and after the experiment, a questionnaire was conducted in the experimental group(EG) to collect the data concerning the students' attitude towards this Reading to Write approach. Both the students in the experimental group(EG) and in the control group(CG) took a pre-test and a post-test to find out the change of students' English writing level. An interview conducted among nine students from the EG after the experiment was taken to identify the students' attitude towards this Reading to Write approach and their English writing.The results show that this Reading to Write approach can enhance the students' overall writing ability significantly. It improved the integrity of content most and the accuracy and richness of language the least.However, due to the small sample and limited time, teachers still need to continuously explore and improve the efficiency in the process of English writing teaching.