A Study On The Effects Of Theme-based Reading-to-write Teaching Mode On Senior High School Students' English Writing Ability

Writing is an indispensable component of English learning and writing ability embodies English learners' language proficiency.However,in contemporary Chinese educational context,senior high school students often feel daunted by the writing task,whose problems are manifested in lack of sentence diversity,incoherence within writing product and inadequacy of composition content.And teachers,who regard the writing teaching as time consuming with low efficiency,place more emphasis on the impartment of English knowledge like vocabulary and grammar and the instruction in other language skills like listening and reading.In this case,the condition and effects of traditional English writing instructional mode are far from satisfactory.With the increasing popularity of overseas studies on theme-based instruction and reading-tomode,Chinese researchers have also recognized the significance of these two modes and begun to carry out relevant research.In theme-based instruction,more attention is paid to the obtainment of topic-related information,which provides a meaningful context for students' language learning.And under reading-to-write mode,sufficient reading input is viewed as a driving force for smoother output in writing.So the author,combining the advantages of these two approaches,intends to propose an effective writing teaching mode which has application value in current high school English writing class.And the purpose of this paper is to give a detailed account of concrete teaching procedures in this new teaching mode and verify its effects on high school students' English writing ability through the quantitative and qualitative research.Three research questions are addressed:(1)What effects does theme-based reading-to-write teaching mode have on the variety of sentence patterns?(2)What effects does themebased reading-to-write teaching mode have on students' awareness of textual coherence?(3)What effects does theme-based reading-to-write teaching mode have on students' performance in content adequacy?In this study,126 students from two parallel Senior 2 classes of a four-star high school in Suqian city are determined as research subjects.One is experimental class(EC)which is made up of 64 students;the other is control class(CC)where the number is 62.According to their final English test results at the first high school year and their pre-test English writing scores,there exists no significant difference in writing ability between these two classes.The pre-questionnaire survey is administered to learn about students' attitudes towards English writing and the post-questionnaire survey is meant to discover EC students' self-perceived changes in their English writing ability and habits.Pre-test and post-test are designed to provide more objective evidence about EC students' improvement in English writing performance after receiving the new writing instruction.Interview with six students of three different proficiency levels is carried out to probe into students' cognitive processes under this new teaching mode.On the basis of statistical analysis,it's found that the theme-based reading-to-write mode can improve high school students' English writing ability.Their improvement in three specific aspects can be concluded as follows:(1)They make progress in the construction of various sentence patterns,especially those who are of high and medium English proficiency level.They are capable of relying on more varied and complicated sentence patterns like noun clauses and inverted sentences in their writing.(2)They get notable improvement in their awareness of textual coherence,as can be shown from their flexible application of multiple connectives according to the discourse context like different types of ordinal conjunction and causal conjunction.(3)They make significant gains in the adequacy of their writing content,especially who are highly proficient in English.They extend their breadth of writing content and strengthen the depth of writing ideas.The finding leads us to conclude that the development of this new writing teaching mode is of certain referential significance to English teachers in domestic high school.If teachers can implement their writing instruction around the meaningful theme and prepare different reading materials around the topic for students' later better writing,students' writing ability can get substantial improvement.In actual writing teaching practice,the following points call for the teachers' attention:(1)The writing teaching theme should conform to the practical needs and diverse interests of students.Only in this way can students remarkably improve their motivation to engage in the instructional process.(2)Teachers should provide students with adequate reading materials around the writing theme since sufficient input is an important prerequisite for their successful output.(3)Teachers should familiarize students with the criteria for assessing their English writing product.When knowing how their compositions are evaluated,students will definitely endeavor to ensure their writing quality in terms of sentence,structure and content.(4)While implementing the new writing teaching mode,teachers should pay close attention to the actual performance of different students,especially those who are weak in English study.Of course,there exists limitations in the present study as to the experimental period and research subjects.And further studies are needed to extend the time of teaching experiment and contain more participants from different senior high school grades.