Action Research On English Writing Teaching In Junior Middle School Based On Production-Oriented Approach

Writing,as a comprehensive output activity,becomes a bottleneck for junior high school students.A number of students are unable to use the target vocabulary,sentences or grammar learned before writing.That is to say,there is a serious situation of“separation of learning from use”.Luckily,to solve this problem,Dr.Wen Qiufang proposed the Production-oriented Approach(POA).It has been widely used by many college teachers,among whom Dr.Wen Qiufang and her team members are pioneers.However,it is still not popular with junior high school English teachers for some reasons.This action research is to improve junior high school English writing abilities and target language accuracy on the basis of Production-oriented Approach.The subjects are 40 students from Grade Seven.It also tries to find out some relatively effective methods to teach writing by using production-oriented approach.This research tries to answer the following three questions:(1)How to make use of Production-oriented Approach in middle school English writing teaching to improve the accuracy of target vocabulary in students’ writings?(2)How to make use of Productionoriented Approach in middle school English writing teaching to improve the accuracy of grammar in students’ writings?(3)How to make use of Production-oriented Approach in middle school English writing teaching to improve the accuracy of target sentence structures in students’ writings? The research includes two stages.Tests,questionnaires and experiments are used in the research.In stage one,a pre-test and post-test are carried out from unit 1 to unit 4.The pre-test is before the “enabling” and the post-test is after “enabling”.Then a comparison is made between each pre-test and post-test in terms of errors in target vocabulary,sentence structures and grammar.This is to test whether production-oriented approach can reduce those errors observably.Then the data,students’ writings and questionnaires are analyzed as the basis of second stage design.In stage two,some measures are adopted according to the problems in stage one to improve the writing teaching from unit 5 to unit 8.There is also a pre-test and post-test.The pre-test is before the “enabling” and the post-test is after “enabling”.Then a comparison is also made between each pre-test and post-test in terms of errors in target vocabulary,sentence structures and grammar.This is to test whether the improved teaching procedures can reduce those errors observably.At last,the data,students’ writings and questionnaires are analyzed to see what are effective designs.The research shows that the production-oriented approach can improve the accuracy of target vocabulary,sentence structures and grammar.It also summarizes the effective measures used in the “motivating,enabling and assessing”,among which the enabling measures are summarized in terms of vocabulary,sentences and grammar,for reference by other junior high school teachers.