A Research On The Application Of Production-Oriented Approach To High School English Writing

As a course of learning and applying English language,the general high school English course is connected with the curriculum in the compulsory education stage,which aims to lay a good foundation for students to continue to learn English and develop themselves.English learning covers four aspects including listening,speaking,reading and writing.Actually,writing is the best embodiment of English ability.English writing can not only reflect the ability of understanding but also logic and grammar.Teachers generally pay more attention to reading,for writing,who require students to recite the examples.There are fewer specialized English writing classes,resulting in students’ poor writing logic and coherence.The Senior High School English Curriculum(2017:38)puts forward specific requirements for writing skills in high school stage: students should be able to:(1)delineate the process of events clearly;(2)delineate personal experiences and characteristics of things by means of words and non-words;(3)transfer information to express meanings by means of headlines,icons,images,tables and formats in writing;(4)choose appropriate discourse types according to the purpose of expression;(5)choose vocabulary and grammatical structures according to the needs of expression;(6)choose formal or informal language according to the needs of expression.In response to the teaching conditions of “the separation of learning from using”,Wen Qiufang proposed the Production-Oriented Approach(POA)with Chinese characteristics.The Production-Oriented Approach is put forward to solve the problem of college English teaching,but there is also the problem of the separation of learning from using in English writing teaching in middle school.Therefore,the author applies this teaching approach to English writing teaching at a senior high school to answer two research questions :(1)Can Production-Oriented Approach improve students’ writing performance compared with the Process Approach?(2)What effects does the implementation of Production-Oriented Approach have onthe use of meta-cognitive strategies in students’ writing?The author conducted the teaching research at Hongtong No.3 Middle School,a high school,in two parallel classes at Grade1 in senior high school.The experiment was carried out for three months.During the period of the experiment,the two classes were taught by the same teacher---the author and the same teaching materials but different teaching methods.The Process Approach was applied to the control class and POA was applied to the experimental class.In order to test the influence of POA on students’ English writing scores,the author conducted pre-test and post-test on both classes.In order to test the influence of POA on the use of meta-cognitive strategies in students’ writing,the author sent out questionnaires twice before and after the experiment.The data that were collated at the end of the term were analyzed by SPSS23.0.Independent samples T-test was used to test whether the students’ English writing performance and the use of meta-cognitive strategies had changed between the experimental class and the control class before and after the experiment;the Paired-samples test was used to test whether the students’ English writing performance and the use of meta-cognitive strategies had changed in each class before and after the experiment.In this paper,through three months’ teaching practice of the POA and the analysis of the obtained data,the results of pre-test and post-test showed that the two classes have made of progress in writing at different degrees.However,the progress of the experimental class is greater than the control class,so the POA can improve students’ English performance better than the traditional Process Approach.The results of two questionnaires showed that POA can enable students to use meta-cognitive strategies more proficiently in writing process.In addition,this paper also has some shortcomings.At the end of the paper,the author will put forward some suggestions on teaching and related research after combining the advantages and disadvantages of this teaching experiment.