Effects Of English Original Novels Reading On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Performance

As one of the five language skills,writing occupies a vital role in senior high school English learning.However,the current situation of English writing teaching and learning is not optimistic based on literature review.It is acknowledged that writing and reading are two skills that complement each other.Considering that most students lack of language input in traditional English learning,previous researchers mediated students could have a certain understanding of selecting words to make sentences and organizing the text structure to apply into writing through large amounts of language input.The researcher in this paper hypothesized that through English original novels reading,students could be exposed to authentic and native language,which is also more conducive to language learning.Illuminated by previous studies on this topic and under the theoretical background of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Swain’s Output Hypothesis,and Constructive Learning Theory,the researcher in this paper has attempted to explore effects of English original novels reading on English writing performance of senior high school students to improve the efficiency of English writing teaching.Through implementing a teaching experiment on two paralleled classes of a senior high school in Chongqing for three months,three proposed questions are expected to be solved:(1)What effects of English original novels reading on English writing scores of senior high school students?(2)In what ways does English original novels reading contribute to students’ English writing performance(from the perspective of accuracy,fluency and complexity)?(3)What is senior high school students’ attitude toward English original novels reading?This study has employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods.For the first question,data about English writing scores have been collected and compared between the pretest and the posttest from the experimental class and the control class.For the second question,the researcher has analyzed writing texts by WolfeQuintero T-Units Assessment from the perspective of accuracy,fluency and complexity to explore in what ways does reading English original novels improve students’ English writing performance.For the third question,both questionnaire and interview are adopted to collect students’ attitudes towards promoting English writing by English original novels reading.Through statistical analysis of experimental results,three major findings were obtained and presented.Firstly,students’ writing scores of two classes were improved in the post test comparing with those in the pretest.However,the experimental class has made significant progress in English writing scores by independent samples t-tests and paired samples t-tests in SPSS(26.0)statistic software.Secondly,the researcher has found that the degree of increase of students’ writing fluency,accuracy and complexity in the experimental class is bigger than those in the control class t.Finally,participants in the experimental class have reflected that they have benefited much through English original novels reading and held positive emotional attitudes toward English novels reading by qualitative analysis.The statistical analysis proves that English original novels reading could promote students’ writing performance to some degree under the guidance of teachers demonstrating in terms of writing fluency,accuracy and complexity.Therefore,English original novels reading should be considered to be applied in English teaching to better improve students’ English writing performance.There exist some drawbacks in this study due to subjective and objective factors,and efficiency could be more obvious if students read English original novels for a long time.Thus,later researchers should extend experimental periods,increase amounts of samples and select proper reading materials based on students’ English proficiency.Some teaching implications have been listed to improve English writing efficiency in senior high school,and some practical significance and theoretical meanings have presented on this topic in this thesis.