The Effects Of Process Approach On Senior High School Students’ Ability Of Summary Writing

Since the summary writing test was first adopted in Zhejiang College Entrance Examination in 2016,its importance has become increasingly prominent.Summary writing is based on the discourse and requires students to provide a brief summary of it.Students need to understand the article and grasp its main ideas on the basis of information integration.The process approach was proposed by Wallace in the late1970 s.This writing approach focuses on the process of writing rather than on the result of it.According to this approach,the writing stage should be divided into preparation,first draft,feedback,revision,final draft and sharing stage.Different from the traditional writing teaching approach,the process approach emphasizes students’ self-correction and evaluation between classmates,and finally the teacher’s evaluation.Students need to go through stages of feedback and revision before forming the final draft.Therefore,this thesis applied the process approach to the summary writing.Through a semester of teaching,students’ writings were analyzed to explore the influence on their ability.This study focuses on the two questions:1)What effects does the application of process approach have on students’ ability of summary writing?2)Do students change their attitudes towards summary writing classes under the guidance of process approach?The research objects are from two natural classes in the second grade of high school in Jinchang No.1 Middle School in Gansu Province.There are 49 students in the control class and 50 students in the experimental class.The two classes have the same level of English writing and were taught by the same teacher with the same teaching materials and teaching progress.The control class was taught using traditional product approach while the experimental class was taught through process approach.This study collected data through questionnaire,interview and pretest and post-test of teaching experiment.At the same time,SPSS 26.0 was used to analyze the measured data.The test paper was graded by the author and another one senior teacher according to the rating scales,and the average of the two was taken at last.The data showed that the experimental class had a great improvement in the post-test results compared with the pretest,and the difference was obvious.Meanwhile,students in experimental class have gained great improvement in language accuracy,language complexity,fidelity to the origin text,cohesion and coherence and writing normality.Although the results of the post-test of the control class increased slightly compared with the pretest,there was no significant difference.The results showed that process approach could improve the ability of summary writing in high school students.During the teaching process,the process approach has been well accepted by students and has also arisen their interest in learning.The author believed that the process approach had certain significance for the improvement of high school students’ English summary writing ability and could be used in teaching.