The Application Of Narrow Reading To English Writing In Senior High School

Writing,as one of the basic abilities of language learners,is not only the focus of the college entrance examination but also the difficulty of language teaching.Therefore,it is very urgent and necessary to learn from the previous theories and research results of predecessors to explore new writing approaches.In this study,the author attempts to apply narrow reading to English writing in senior high school.Narrow reading refers to reading a series of texts with the same topic,the same genre,or the same author.At present,the studies on narrow reading mainly focus on reading,listening,and vocabulary acquisition,but there are fewer studies on writing.Therefore,guided by Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis,the study attempts to explore the effects of narrow reading on students’ English overall writing achievements in senior high school.Besides,the study also explores the effects of narrow reading on content,language accuracy,diversity of sentence patterns,and contextual coherence of students’ English writing achievements in senior high school.In this study,96 students were selected as the subjects from two classes in the No.1 High School of Kangle.The author randomly treated class 7 of Grade One as the control class and class 16 of Grade One as the experimental class respectively.Before the experiment,the author carried out a pretest on the students.After analyzing the data of the pretest,it was found that the writing level of the students in the two classes was equivalent.In the experiment,the product-oriented approach was adopted in the control class.Generally speaking,the product-oriented approach was that the teacher first provided the model essay and then explained it.After students imitated and finished the compositions,the teacher reviewed the students’ compositions and finally made a collective comment.However,the experimental class adopted the narrow reading to English writing approach.The teacher needed to select the same style,the same theme,or several works of a certain writer for students to read before writing.Next,under the leadership of the teacher,students summarized the main ideas and characteristics of the texts.Then the students wrote and after students finished their compositions,students first evaluated their compositions by themselves,and then the teacher reviewed them and made a collective comment.After 14 weeks of the experiment,the author conducted a posttest in the two classes.Finally,the collected data were analyzed by SPSS 23.0.After comparing the experimental data,it was found that narrow reading had positive effects on English writing.First,narrow reading significantly improved students’ overall English writing achievements.Second,narrow reading made students’ writing content richer and deeper.Furthermore,in the process of narrow reading,students could accumulate knowledge of words,phrases,and grammar,which improved the language accuracy of English compositions.In addition,narrow reading made sentence patterns more diverse in students’ English compositions.Finally,narrow reading improved the coherence of students’ English compositions.