An Action Research On Production-oriented Approach In Senior High English Sentence-writing Teaching

As an important output skill,the status of writing has gradually increased in the foreign language teaching and assessment.Since the implementation of the new college entrance examination,the proportion,value and difficulty of writing have been further increased,which has put higher demands on the writing ability of high school students.However,the phenomenon of “separation of learning and application”,i.e.,the disconnection between input and output,exists in foreign language teaching in China,which directly leads to students’ relatively weak writing ability,especially for low-level students.They make the most mistakes in vocabulary and syntax in writing.Correction of vocabulary misuse requires long periods of reading input and language knowledge.Sentence errors,however,can be improved in a limited amount of time with explicit instruction,and students can write correct sentences using basic sentence patterns,combining sentences or expanding compound sentences.However,traditional sentence teaching has the disadvantage of “emphasizing structure but not communication”,which is manifested by explaining and practicing sentence patterns in isolation from the context.In order to improve the shortage of sentence pattern teaching and bring out its value,this study is guided by the Production-Oriented Approach,which provides realistic and diversified contexts for sentence pattern teaching and helps students move from mechanical mastery of sentence patterns to flexible use.Therefore,this study investigates the implementation path of this teaching method and verifies whether it can improve the single-sentence writing ability and writing performance of low-level students.The significance of the study is to improve the unsatisfactory teaching situation and to provide some solutions for teaching writing to low-level students.In order to build a bridge between theory and practice,this study adopts an action research method to explore and teach basic sentence writing under a Production-Oriented Approach in a real high school English writing teaching context in three stages,collecting and analyzing both qualitative(student feedback,peer feedback)and quantitative data(writing texts,language tests),seeking to confirm the hypotheses in the triangulation of data.After three months of pedagogical action,the following results and conclusions were drawn from this study.First,the pre-and post-test scores of sentence patterns,monthly exam essay scores,and text analysis showed that teaching basic sentence writing under the Production-Oriented Approach not only improved writing scores,but also inspired students to use participles and subordinate clauses to increase language richness.Secondly,according to the principles of teaching procedures of the Production-Oriented Approach,the procedures and steps of teaching sentence writing are summarized.Finally,a small number of students with very poor English made less progress,mainly because sentence writing is based on vocabulary.Otherwise,sentence learning is difficult to advance.Therefore,sentence writing teaching is only suitable for students with certain language foundation.