An Empirical Study On Brainstorming Strategy In Junior High School English Writing Teaching

As we all know,it is one of the primary goals of foreign language teaching to promote students’ writing fluency ability in the 21 st century.The English curriculum standards for compulsory education(2011 Edition)emphasizes the dual nature of language instrumental and humanistic essences.Instrumental essence refers to paying attention to the cultivation of students’ language using ability,and humanistic essence refers to the cultivation of students’ basic thinking ability and emotional expression ability.This dual nature should be reflected in the teaching purpose of English writing skills in junior high school so that students are willing to express facts,opinions and emotions in written language.The traditional teaching approach of writing is based on explaining model composition,which is lack of training for students’ thinking ability.As one of the pre-writing strategies,brainstorming strategy has not only been proved to be conducive to stimulating students’ writing inspiration and improving their organizational ability based on domestic empirical research,but also proved by foreign scholars that the strategy can expand students’ writing ideas and enrich their writing content.The junior high school stage is a critical period for the cultivation of students’ logical divergence ability.Therefore,in order to improve the interest and writing level of students in junior high school,the author applies brainstorming strategy with junior high school writing teaching.Based on Constructivism Theory,Schema Theory,Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Cooperative Learning Theory,this study combines brainstorming strategy with writing to verify whether students’ writing performance has a significant impact through specific teaching steps.The research questions are as followed:(1)Does brainstorming strategy arouse the writing interest of junior high school students?(2)Does brainstorming strategy improve the writing proficiency of junior high school students?In order to explore the above two questions,this study conducted an empirical study on 88 students in two classes of eighth grade in one junior high school in Nanchang,Jiangxi province as the research subjects.These two classes were regarded as the experimental class and control class respectively.The control class was taught according to the product-oriented writing teaching approach,and the experimental class was applied with brainstorming strategy.From individual brainstorming to group brainstorming to the whole class brainstorming,the teaching was carried out step by step.Then,data were collected through questionnaires,tests and interview.The author made a quantitative analysis of the pre-test and post-test of the two classes with SPSS19.0.The results of the collected questionnaires data show that the brainstorming strategy can arouse junior high school students’ writing interest.The test data of writing show that the writing performance of the experimental class has been improved significantly.According to the analysis of relevant tables and figures,the writing proficiency of the experimental class is improved greatly in fluency and writing conception.From the interview results,it can be seen that brainstorming strategy not only expands the writing ideas,but also enriches the writing content.Finally,the research puts forward some suggestions on writing teaching content,teaching subjects,teaching period and teaching resources provided by schools.