An Experimental Study On Project-based Learning In Senior High School English Writing Teaching

In the course of the national college entrance examination reform,the writing portion of the test is added continuation writing,and the complexity of measuring students’ writing abilities has increased significantly.Continuation writing demands students continue writing paragraphs with structure and meaning that are consistent with the assigned reading materials,which is an excellent measure of students’ coherent writing abilities.However,in the reality of front-line education,the teaching of discourse cohesion is literally just empty talk,and it is difficult for students to apply what they learn in the classroom to real-life situations.There are few opportunities for students to learn writing systematically,and the conversion rate from knowledge to skills is low consequently.Many students are afraid of writing,lack enthusiasm to write,and are unwilling to learn.The majority of them do not provide high-quality output content.How to encourage students to write with a high degree of motivation?How to increase the coherence of students’ writing? It has become a difficulty in teaching writing.Project-based Learning(PBL),as a complete and practical educational method,guides students through six areas of integrated autonomous and cooperative learning: project selection,plan formulation,activity exploration,work production,achievement exchange,and activity evaluation.Students are encouraged to acquire,comprehend,practice,transfer,and innovate topic knowledge in the project based on real-world issue settings,and students’ learning is spontaneously generated in this sequence of activities.Project-based learning was added into this research in order to decrease the distance between students and writing learning,boost students’ writing motivation,and investigate a more efficient and acceptable writing teaching style.As a consequence,this research tries to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the effects on students’ motivation for writing based on PBL?(2)What are the changes of students’ writing coherence after being taught by theteaching method based on PBL?The research experiment was conducted in Xingyi No.1 Middle School in Guizhou Province,a total of 107 students whose writing proficiency are basically the same were selected from Class 13(the control class)and Class 3(the experimental class)of Grade One and the experiment lasts for 16 weeks.With a duration of 16 weeks,the EC uses PBL,while the CC adopts a process-oriented approach.The test methods,questionnaire surveys are used for the research,and an interview method is used as a supplement.The following results are drawn from the experiment: After instructed by PBL,the EC’s writing performance from aspects of writing motivation and writing coherence got satisfying changes.As far as the writing motivation,the EC’s degree of writing anxiety decreased.What’ s more,the self-efficacy of writing has increased,and students have successfully strengthened their selfmanagement of writing and established clear writing goals.Additionally,students have made positive improvements in their understanding of the techniques for discourse cohesion and have improved the coherence of their writing.However,the CC showed no obvious improvement in writing motivation both before and after using the process-oriented method.The pre-test and post-test data barely differed in terms of discourse cohesion learning.The majority of students used relatively procedural,rough discourse coherence techniques that lacked semantic coherence.The limitations of this study include the small number of research participants,the author’s lack of operational expertise in PBL,which consumed some of the given research time,individual student variations that led to varied understandings of PBL,etc.These variables have an impact on the experimental findings,which require more research.