A Comparative Study On The Effects Of The Product Approach And Process Approach On Secondary Vocational School Students’ English Writing

Nowadays the importance of English is well-known to almost every student.As for vocational students,they need more to have the skills to use English to deal with the daily matters in their future profession.The importance of English writing is hence undoubtedly obvious.However,the writing proficiency of vocational school students is not satisfying.In order to change this situation,it is necessary for English researchers to explore more effective teaching approaches to improve the efficiency of vocational school students’English writing ability.Most teachers in China applied the product approach or process approach in English writing teaching.In this study,the author took students of two science classes in the first grade of Danyang Secondary Vocational School as the research participants to operate the 14-week teaching experiment.In the experiment,a pre-test,mid-test and post-test with a 6-week interval were conducted to answer the research questions:(1)Which approach can better improve secondary vocational school students’ English writing ability,the product approach or process approach?(2)Of the product approach or process approach,which one is more effective for higher-achievers and lower-achievers?To answer the questions,the results in the mid-test and post-test were compared by the independent sample t-test method in general and in detail,and then the results of higher-achievers and lower-achievers were analyzed separately to see the different effects of the two approaches on the students of different levels.Meanwhile,some random interviews were followed to help explain the result in the experiment.The statistical analysis indicated that both the product approach and process approach had significant effect on vocational school students’ writing and there was not any big difference between them.Specifically speaking,in a short time,the product approach had greater effect on the writing of vocabulary appropriateness.The students under the instruction of the product approach were trained to use some vocabularies in the model text at the beginning of the writing class,so they could get much more language input in the short term;in a long time,the product approach affected more on grammatical structure,while the process approach had greater influence in terms of information integrity.The reason was that under the guidance of the product approach,imitation training played an important role in the improvement of grammar,while group.interaction and cooperation constructed knowledge and led to improvement in the section of information integrity.As for the students of different levels,the two teaching approaches had equal influence on higher-achievers,while the product approach had greater effect on lower-achievers.There was no distinctive difference in the effect of the two approaches on higher-achievers,because higher-achievers usually had a good self-control ability and were seldom influenced by external factors.In detail,the process approach had greater effect on higher-achievers in terms of vocabulary appropriateness in a short time,because the cooperation in group helped students modify their output and optimized their own vocabularies.In the long run,the process approach had significant improvement in the section of grammatical structure and coherence,because they constructed new knowledge by group cooperation.On the other hand,the product approach had greater effect on the writing of lower-achievers.Specifically,the section of grammatical structure was improved greatly by the product approach in the short term,because the imitation of grammatical structures in the model text helped the students reduce errors.Furthermore,the section of vocabulary appropriateness was improved greatly by the product approach in a long time,because the lower-achievers tended to use the vocabularies accumulated in the writing teaching and it lowered the risk of making mistakes.Therefore,in view of advantages and disadvantages of the product approach and process approach,it can be a direction of future study to mix the two teaching approaches according to the teaching contents and teaching objects.