An Empirical Study On Teaching Of College English Writing:An Ecological Teaching Approach

College English as a compulsory course is a very important component of higher education,which can help the all-round development of college students,playing a unique role in the cultivation of innovative talents.In the 21 st century,with the continuous development of national and social progress and the change of teaching environment,the traditional college English teaching method is difficult to adapt to the new situation,teaching reform and the further improvement,the quality of college English teaching become an important task to which much attention should be attached.How to adapt to the new teaching environment and the social demand has become the research topic for college English teachers,experts and scholars.Against such a background,this present study attempts to re-examine the college English teaching environment from the ecological teaching approach,trying to use the principles and methods of ecology and ecological education to guide the teaching of college English writing.It is aimed to improve the quality and level of the college students' writing and contribute to the improvement of college English teaching level and teaching effect.Teachers of traditional class are often challenged by large class sizes and the students fear or are inexperienced with classroom discussion.In traditional college English writing teaching class,teachers tend to ignore the students' emotional factors,and the students' cognitive level and cognitive ability.They are likely to ignore the students' different characters and they usually fail to pay enough attention to interaction between teachers and students.Teachers guided by the traditional model tend to adopt the way of teaching the good essays,and in the teaching process they focused on explanation of the grammar structure,paid attention on fixed sentence patterns as well as the set sentences which can be used in the writing test.The writing teaching is often separated from the actual teaching practice and students' real conditions.Usually teachers' lecturing in traditional class lead to the situation in which the students listen to lectures passively,and the classroom lacks of vigor and vitality,even worse the students gradually become tired of English writing.The traditional approach on college English writing teaching has failed to achieve the expected teaching goal and did not improve the students' writing level.This study attempts to apply ecological teaching concept to the teaching of college English writing class,and the author comprehensively considered the target language,learners,teachers and all kinds of teaching elements such as learning environment,aiming to improve the level of college English writing.It aims to draw the students' interest,and arouse the students' learning enthusiasm and teachers' teaching writing motivation.This study conducts an empirical study on the application of the ecological teaching approach in college English writing.The present study aims to address three questions: i)Will the ecological approach affect the students' interest and confidence in English writing? ii)Can the ecological teaching method promote the improvement of college English writing ? iii)Can the ecological teaching method really improve the English writing teaching level of the experimental class and affect students' writing performance? The author carried the teaching approach in college English classroom in Yan'an University,taking Chinese Class 1 as the experimental class and Chinese Class 2 as the control class.Teaching textbook is New Horizon College English(2nd Edition)published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.The two classes are taught by the author,and the teaching of experiment lasted 16 weeks.In the implementation of research,the experimental class adopted ecological teaching approach,whereas the control class employs the traditional teaching method.The whole experiment process is mainly divided into four stages,namely,experiment preparation,trial implementation stage,the adjustment stage and the post-test.First of all,the author detects the practical English writing level of Class 1 through a pre-test.The pre-test is followed by interviews and observation in the class to get an understanding of students' attitude towards ecological teaching methodology.The study intends to make conclusion through the analysis of the data from the pre-test and the post-test and the data from the questionnaires,which is processed by using the technique of SPSS for statistical analysis.Finally,through the survey and questionnaire,we got positive answers to the question of this experimental study.Experimental process enables the students to be interested in writing and the confidence of writing and their writing ability has also improved.The present research corroborates the claims of ecological teaching method for college English writing teaching,which can improve the students' interest in learning and make great influence on students' writing level.Through the empirical research of writing teaching,the following conclusion can be drawn.Firstly,the ecological teaching approach can enhance the students' interest and confidence in college English writing,and help students to grasp some useful writing strategies so as to promote the students' English writing ability.Secondly,ecological teaching method can better improve the students' writing ability and innovation ability.The study includes suggestions for teachers on how to plan a course or a lecture by setting a good learning environment.The thesis adopts the novel teaching approach to the teaching of college English writing,with an aim of testing the efficacy of the approach on teaching college English writing.With some positive conclusions,the study corroborates the hypothesis of this study.But due to the limited research time,the subjective evaluation of the compositions,and the author's limited theoretical level,the study also has some limitations.The study also gives some proposals for the future research on this topic.