A Study On The Correlation Between Group Collaborative Writing And English Writing Interest And Proficiency

Writing,as one of the communicative skills,is an important part of English teaching.However,the teaching effect of English writing in senior high school is far from satisfactory,and the main reason is that teachers only adopt traditional Product Approach.In this teaching method,too much attention is paid to linguistic knowledge and the final products,while students’ writing process is ignored.Teachers fail to motivate students to write by creating various scenarios based on students’ personal experience and cognitive abilities.Also,teachers fail to guide students to improve their writing efficiency through communication and cooperation.As a result,many students lack interest in writing and their writing proficiency can hardly meet the requirements of the English Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition,2020 Revised),including the ability to use proper demonstrative pronouns,transitional words or linking sentences to make the essay logical and coherent,and the ability to use vocabulary and structures appropriately and so on.Therefore,this study aims to improve students’ English writing interest and writing proficiency by means of group collaborative writing.Based on the Cooperative Learning theory,the Process Approach and the Constructive Learning theory,group collaborative writing means working in heterogeneous group of four,and according to different topics and types of writing,students need to cooperate to finish corresponding tasks at different stages,including pre-writing,making the first draft,revising and editing,and to create an essay about one hundred and twenty words to express their feelings and thoughts.Group collaborative writing can help students to exchange their ideas and learn from each other well due to the individual differences.So this study tries to answer the following questions:(1)Can collaborative writing enhance students’ writing interest and improve their writing proficiency?(2)The researcher tries to find out the reasons as well.To answer the questions,an experiment was carried out in two classes in Grade Two of Guiyang No.1 High School,both of which were the same type of classes.Group collaborative writing was applied in Class 2,which was taught by the researcher.While traditional teaching method was applied in Class 7,whose English teacher had similar experience and teaching ability to the researcher.The research tools include writing test,questionnaire,interview and so on.The essays written by students in the tests were graded by two experienced teachers,the questionnaires were collected and calculated,and the conversation was recorded by the researcher.According to the results of questionnaire and interview,group collaborative writing has enhanced the students’ English writing interest,for it offered a supportive writing environment,where students were eager to learn more and willing to express their thoughts.Besides,according to the test scores and students’ essays,group collaborative writing has improved students’ English writing proficiency.Not only were students able to write an essay containing all the main points,but also they were able to use transitional words or linking sentences to make the essay logical and coherent,and to use vocabulary and structures appropriately.This was because group members provided timely feedback and correction,and they could learn many advanced expressions and sentence structures from each other.Thus,their English writing efficiency improved greatly.Finally,the researcher summarizes some pedagogical implications for the teaching of writing in senior high school.For example,it is necessary to shift the traditional roles of the teachers and students to establish a harmonious relationship,to create authentic writing scenarios to motivate students to write,to focus on students’ writing process and to cultivate students’ sense of cooperation.Although some results have been found by doing the research,some limitations of the study also need to be mentioned.For example,the size of the subjects is relatively small,the duration of the experiment is relatively short and there are some human factors.Therefore,some suggestions are put forward for further studies in the future to make the results more effective and suitable.