A Lesson Study On English Writing Strategy Training Of Junior High School Students

As one of the fundamental language skills,English writing has always occupied an important proportion in English teaching and testing of middle school.Junior high school teachers have been trying to make clear how to teach English writing effectively.In order to explore effective writing teaching,this study aims to train junior high school students in writing strategies,with a view to promoting teachers to use a variety of writing teaching methods in the classroom and to help junior high schools students improve their English writing skills.Based on the above research background,this research attempts to address two questions as follows:1)What are the current situations and causes of junior high school students’ use of writing strategies in English writing?2)What are the influences of English writing strategy training on students’ writing performance?Aiming at answering the research questions,the research used the method of Lesson Study advocated by a British expert Peter Dudley.Lesson Study includes two cycles of teaching: teaching planning,first round of teaching,adjust the instructional design according to observation and reflection,second round of teaching,analysis and summary.This lesson study used explanatory sequential mixed method.The research participants include 43 students in Grade 8 of a junior high school in Tianjin.The period of strategy training is three weeks.The strategies that focused on training involves “setting writing goals,planning for content,accessing the audience,getting ideas,attending to language at the word level,attending to grammatical structures,writing an essay,revising an essay,getting feedback and revising”（Gu 2011: 68）.The author used four kinds of research instruments in this study: questionnaire,tests,interview and reflection journal.Questionnaire and tests were used for quantitative analysis.Interview and reflection journal were used for qualitative analysis.By analyzing of all of gathering data,a number of findings can be summarized.First of all,the study found that students have a better understanding of many writing strategies and can use them consciously or subconsciously in the writing process.But some strategies are less used such as planning and revising,which need to be trained further.Secondly,it can be concluded after the writing strategy instruction,there is enhancement in students’ awareness of using writing strategies and the improvement in students’ writing performances,especially those that have been specifically trained over a long period of time.Thirdly,in order to improve students’ writing ability,it’s a good idea for teachers to combine language competence improving and writing strategies training together in further teaching.Giving more strategy training and giving students more opportunities to practice them are good ways throughout the whole teaching process.