A Study On The Effects Of Prewriting Discussion Task On Writing Fluency

"Prewriting discussion" means that students are divided into groups in class and are guided by teacher to discuss a certain topic so that they can increase the chance of deep understanding and quickly complete writing within a limited time.However,researches on it has focused on its impact on the overall ability to write,and they mostly investigated advanced English learners such as college students and English major.In particular,the effect of it on writing fluency has not been explored,and there is no specific quantitative discussion on whether prewriting discussion can help students improve their writing fluency.Therefore,in order to fill this gap,the focus of this study is to investigate the effect of "prewriting discussion" on writing fluency.This study adopted experiment to investigate the role of "prewriting discussion" in writing fluency.Participants of this study were 89 students from two classes of an ordinary senior high school,who were divided into experimental class and control class respectively.Students were asked to write a composition on given topic.During the experiment,students took writing training every two weeks,in which the experimental class used the teaching task of "prewriting discussion",while the control class adopted the traditional writing teaching.After the experiment,students in both classes were again asked to write a composition on a given topic as a post-test.For the sake of further exploring students’ views on the effect of prewriting discussion on writing fluency,a questionnaire was employed in this study(Cronbach’s a=0.673).In addition,in order to make up for the shortcomings of the questionnaire and increase the reliability of this study,this study also provided interviews with 4 students from different self-writing levels,so as to look forward to better effects of the study.The findings of the study are as follows: Firstly,after two months of training,there is a significant difference in writing fluency between the experimental class and the control class.As the total words of the composition and the number of words per T-unit were used as the fluency measurement indicators in this study,the difference in writing fluency reached a significant level(P=0.04<0.05 and P=0.017<0.05).That is to say,compared with the control class,the writing fluency of the experimental class is higher.Secondly,there was a significant difference in writing fluency among the higher-level students(P=0.022<0.05 and 0.013<0.05),while there was no significant difference among the lower-level students(0.622>0.05 and 0.09>0.05).Prewritingdiscussion is more effective in improving writing fluency of advanced students.Thirdly,in terms of questionnaire and interview,prewriting discussion provide students with a variety of positive effects and indeed improved writing fluency,especially for high-level writers.Based on the findings presented above,this study has proposed several implications for both learners and teachers: firstly,students with good language knowledge can do more prewriting discussion task to improve their writing fluency.Secondly,lower-level learners are not suitable for prewriting discussion,but they can improve their writing fluency by appropriate combination of traditional teaching methods.Thirdly,teachers should choose appropriate and reasonable teaching tasks according to students’ language level,so as to provide them with a platform to show their ability and enhance their writing fluency.Fourthly,teachers should focus on the needs of students and innovate more activities and teaching methods.