Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of Writing Teaching
Writing, as one of the four basic skills in second language learning, is very important to allEnglish learners. It has been a useful tool to communicate with others in many aspects, likeculture, politics, business, and etc. Writing reflects the comprehensive language competence oflearners’, in the meantime; it inspires their thinking activities to speed up the process of languageacquisition. Writing skills have been measured in many tests, like CET4, CET6, TOEFL, IELTS,and so on. Writing can internalize the language rules, which can direct learners to analyze,synthesize, judge and recreate the language by their own. So how to write effectively and how toteach writing effectively is always the concern of second language writing.However, writing has been a difficult part for second language learners no matter whichstage they are in. Just like Nunan (1999) asserts that the most difficult thing in language is toproduce a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing. Hyland (2017) believes writing isamong the most important skills that the second language learners should develop and the abilityto teach writing is of vital important to a well-trained language teacher. Yet, present writinginstruction is far off at best. There are lots of problems in students’ writing, ranging fromvocabulary to structure and content. There are full of meager words with wrong use andgrammatical mistakes in the compositions. The loose structures, the lacking of conjunctions, theambiguous topic sentences can be observed here and there. Hu Meihua (1994) reports that since1987 when the CET4 was first held, the average writing score failed to come up to the requiredstandards of “ College English Curriculum”. In 1996, the average score is only 5.07(total score is15). Wang Yi (2017) compares Hu Meihua’s reports with the recent CET4 writing score andfinds the average writing score in 2017 is just 6.7, which means, the average score only rises1.63 points after 14 years.
…………
1.2 Purpose and Significance
It is very difficult for second language learners to learn English well without native-likeenvironment, especially to improve their writing skills. In China, many researchers have beenpaid much attention to improving the current writing instruction. They are making efforts tointroduce new ideas, methods, approaches and schools from abroad, hoping to find out the mosteffective and efficient teaching activities. In second language writing, it is apparent thatsufficient input is an indispensable element (Krashen, 1984), which can not be neglected. Manyresearchers now admit the reading and writing are two closely integrated processes. Berthoff(1983) asserts that “how we construe is how we construct”. Learners should read intensively,through which they gain valuable information that can constitute writing. As a result, it isprobable to explore an effective method to improve English writing through the combination ofreading and writing. The best way is to emphasize the language input and encourage students touse what have learned as much as they can (Wang, 2017). Reading is the basic source oflanguage. Learners obtain information through reading and reflect it through writing. So readingis an indispensable part in improving writing skills. There is no denying that many researchersagree th，英语论文网站，英语论文题目
|
