如何提高中學(xué)生英語(yǔ)寫作能力-畢業(yè)論文

1、【標(biāo)題】如何提高中學(xué)生英語(yǔ)寫作能力 【作者】羅海秀 【關(guān)鍵詞】英語(yǔ)寫作;現(xiàn)狀;問(wèn)題;方法 【指導(dǎo)老師】王 露 陳 慧 【專業(yè)】英語(yǔ) 【正文】i. introduction“writing is concerned, with communication with others, a process which we call transmission.1 from wilkinsons definition of writing we can see that writing is, first of all, a process, which a writer writes for a pa

2、rticular object view. only in this way can writing be regarded with the emphasis oncommunicative skills. in the second language context, such as the situation in china where english is learned as a foreign language in the overwhelming majority of middle schools all over the country, writing or learn

3、ing to write in english is commonly considered as an advanced and demanding requirement that is added to the complexities inherent in trying to master foreign language-english. among the four basic skills, writing is the weak-point of middle school students in china. although in recent years much mo

4、re emphasis is put on the students productive skills, due to the limited time, they are not taken very seriously in practice. in current middle school teaching in china, usually the teacher is in charge of many aspects of the students english study. for example, in many schools, an english teacher h

5、as to teach listening, speaking, intensive and extensive reading and writing. apart from listening, the other skills are dealt with in the intensive reading class, which is only four periods every week. since there are so many tasks to be coped with in such limited time, it seems impossible for the

6、teacher to have enough time to deal with students writing skills. for more than one decade, middle school students and teachers have been trying, to their wits end, to meet the requirement set down by the national syllabus of middle school english teaching(nsmset) 2 and to fulfill the writing assign

7、ment, which is included in such national-scale examination in their english test. unfortunately, the results are far from being satisfactory, only a small amount of the students has actually developed the level of english writing skills while the large part of students are still frustrated and wande

8、ring at the threshold of the english writing realm. this paper will first analyze the current situation of middle school english writing in china. the second part will explain some of the existing problems, which hinder the development of students english writing proficiency in middle schools in chi

9、na. the third part of the essay will be mainly devoted to a discussion about some possible ways, which might be employed to the solution of the existing problems. last, this paper puts forward an especially effective way which can make a difference in improving middle school students english writing

10、.ii. problems of english writing in middle schoolsa. current situation of middle school students english writingchecking the latest english writing in middle schools, it can be easily found that the number of words contained in a composition is more or less 100 words and the styles of the compositio

11、n vary year after year. its not easy to produce a good piece of english writing. the writers must choose the right topic, vocabulary, idiom, and tune. the content must be clear, relevant, and logical. they must pay more attention to choose the suitable grammatical rules. not all the students can do

12、them well. teachers need to build awareness in student writers that the organization of a piece of writing should be appropriate to its purpose, its audience of readers. this will affect the range of cohesive devices that are used to create complex sentences or to develop paragraphs. it will also af

13、fect the range of vocabulary. this implies that a piece of writing could be judged on a set of criteria including appropriateness, range, and complexity. many traditional marking systems have placed great emphasis on accuracy but teachers now try to use a wider set of criteria which relate to what t

14、hey know of successful writers and writing. this list is divided into authoring skills and crafting skills, though there is clearly overlap between them. however, representing writing in this way takes us away from the traditional concept of seeing assessment as a matter of checking just for accurac

15、y. in devising an assessment schedule, it is possible to select those skills that are appropriate to the age, language development, and writing development of the learners.b. problems of english writing in middle schools“writing is a complex and highly intense, mental, physical and emotional activit

16、y.3 we can solve the problems encountered by both writing teachers and students in chinas middle schools only after we have a comprehensive and thorough understanding of the nature of the problems. the writing problems i am going to discuss in this section encompass both objective and subjective one

17、s arising from our english teaching/learning curriculum, the teachers and the students personal attitudes toward writing, as well as our cultural background. writing involves all aspects of language: grammar, vocabulary, word order, spelling and logical arrangement of ideas. students often make mist

18、akes when they start to write, which ruin a good writing. the number of errors is always one of the criteria that teachers will concern in grading students composition since errors of language or of organization are inevitable in students composition. the students english writings contain not only t

19、hose errors commonly occur in the writings of native speakers but also those typically appear in their own writings. 1. misunderstanding of the purposes of writing sow pointed out thatto write well, writers have to sort out their thoughts before deciding how to put all their ideas in coherent manner

20、s on paper. the act of transforming the writers thoughts and ideas about a topic into writing is referred to as the writing process.4 the only correct way to look at writing should be seeing the composing process as anon-linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover and reform

21、ulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning. for students, composing or learning to compose should be regarded as a process or a means which will enable them to realize specific goals at each stage of the composing process which, as suggested by sow, incorporates planning, drafting(writ

22、ing) revising(redrafting), and editing. as far as the writing teacher is concerned, he should see his role as guidance through and intervention in the process rather than a controller. the true writing instructor should be such a compatible whole of three personsranging from teacher as real teacher(

23、i.e. audience), teacher as coach, teacher as evaluator. it is possible for him to teach some process skills appropriate to a writing stage, by modeling the writing process at every stage, by relating process to product, by catering to diverse students needs. contrary to process writing in whichcompo

24、sing means thinking expressing ideas, conveying meaning, writing in china is highly form-and content-dominated. there is a fairly common practice in chinas middle school english writing wherein students are taught to outline their essay before they write. this activity is based on the presumption th

25、at writing is a one-way process of recording, on paper, ideas which are already well thought out and carefully organized. students are expected to write highly rhetorical essays to pass examinations or to excel in the writing course. this form-and content-dominated writing practiceposits an unchangi

26、ng reality which is independent of the writer and which all the writers are expected to describe in the same way regardless of the rhetorical situation, that it neglects invention almost entirely, and that it makes style the most important element in writing. this contradictory confusion between pro

27、cess-based, and form-and content-dominated writings, leads the writing teacher, on the other hand, to instruct composing in a controlled model, operating writing as the handmaid of the other language skills(listening, speaking, reading), which must not take precedence as a major skill to be develope

28、d. on the other hand, the students, struggle, in each composing practice, tofill in a prepared outline and tocorrect grammar and usage errors by drafting and editing. thus, the students motivation for conveying ideas and their awareness of important writer-reader relationship are damaged.2. influenc

29、e of mother tongue it is known that students english ability is strongly influenced by their l1 and l2 writing ability. the learnersl1 is an important determinant of second language acquisitionthe l1 is a resource of knowledge which learners will use both consciously and subconsciously to help them

30、sift the l2 data in the input and to perform as best as they can in the l2the influence of the l1 is likely to be most evident in l2 phonology theforeign accent is ubiquitousbut it will occur in all aspects of the l2. researchers call this influencelanguage interference ortransfer which is a process

31、 of using knowledge of the first language in learning a second language.“transfer can be positive, when a first-language pattern identical with a targetlanguage is transferred, or it can be negative, when a firstlanguage pattern different from the targetlanguage pattern is transferred. in the latter

32、 case, l1 induced errors occur”. many teachers have been aware of the effects of the mother tongue on all aspects of chinese students sla surely including that on the development of english writing ability. transfer in the process of students writing, for the most part, functions negatively. reviewi

33、ng those major types of errors occurred in the students compositions, both some of the errors in grammar and clingfish sentences resulted from negative transfer. this is why teachers often find some other errors in the students composition. mother tongue influence is strong which can be shown as the

34、 following errors:1) the over tendency of placing preposition and other phrases which indicate time(or adverbs which indicate time) at the front of the sentence.2) prefacing the main idea all of the time by usingifwhenin order tofrom;3) shaping too long sentences in a paragraph4) overuse of first pe

35、rson5) word for word translation of chinese phrases instead of idiomatic english pattern6) the confusion between active and passive voice. of course, there are situations in which chinese knowledge transfer functions positively. ellis(1985) suggests that transfer may actively aid l2 learning where t

36、he l1 and l2 are similar. as a matter of fact, writing in english has something in common with writing in chinese though there is difference between the two languages. in the process of both the two kinds of writing, students take account of the following issues: topic, purpose, audience, planning,

37、targeting, organization, drafting, editing, rewriting. 3. for a great amount of students involved in writing although communicative writing theorists and practitioners have never defined the ideal scale of students to be involved in a favorable writing classroom environment, the surprisingly enormou

38、s amount of students involved in chinas middle school class might frighten any ambitious and theory-armed writing teacher to the loss of any idea and control of his. what is with the large population of china, and what is with the urgent lack of enough qualified middle school teachers, a normal clas

39、s for non-english majors has at least fifty students, some having even as mush as eighty or more than one hundred. for some younger teachers, even if they know clearly that the writing should be process-centered, or reader- oriented, and even if they do want to direct their instruction as a private

40、mental activitycomprising four main stages: planning, drafting, revising, and editing, in order to make the writing practice more meaningful and fruitful, how on earth can they realize their plan with such a challenging scale of class? what he has been taught to do becomes a utopia methodology, whic

41、h runs in a vigorous conflict with the pressing reality. under such circumstances, the writing teacher, although he has tried to change the prevalent form-or content-centered teaching procedures, will soon get frustrated, lose their initial enthusiasm, and acquiesce to tradition. he can do nothing b

42、ut to follow suit-giving some advice on theskills of writing in the first place, assigning the students a topic to write in or after class, then collecting the compositions, and finally evaluating them by correcting syntactic or lexical mistakes or just marking a grade. for him, even viewing all the

43、 essays written by the students within the short time before the next writing class constitutes a time-consuming task, how can we expect him to write appropriate and constructive commentary on each piece of writing, or help individual students by discussing with them, getting feedback from them, etc

44、? the students thus are trained, on the other hand, expect less and less from both the writing teacher and the writing class, respond passively to the teachers writing commentary or grade, or totally discard it. they may have to depend on their own toexplore the secrets for successful writing. 4. cu

45、lture influenceslanguage is inextricably bound up with culture. culture values are both reflected by and carried through language. it is inevitable that representation of culture implicitly and explicitly enters into foreign language learning and teaching. teachers often find that the students compo

46、sitions really like translations of chinese. and sometimes students can make sentences without grammatical errors, but native speakers cannot understand them. why do these happen? one reason is that the students are not good at english. another possible answer researchers suggest is the culture diff

47、erence. american linguist robert kaplans research in this area provides a theoretical base for this assumption. in this study of contrastive rhetoric, robert kaplan first proposed that the writing of nonnative speakers in systematic and identifiable ways. he also claimed that rhetorical organization

48、 of writing text and its progression are often determined by the thought pattern of members of a particular culture. since his original publication, researchers have come to recognize that the structure of writing text and its paradigms is based on cultural frameworks, derived from different stylist

49、ic, religious, ethical, and social notions, all of which comprise written discourse conventions. the conceptualizations of the purpose of writing determined rhetorical constructs. the quality of writing and ideas expressed in it often become important issues in communication between members of diffe

50、rent cultures. influenced by the traditional culture, chinese middle school students english writing is different from those written by native english speakers in varied aspects of the text such as diction, syntax, organization, and the overall style.iii. some possible ways that might be employed to

51、 the solution of the existing problems in order to find some satisfying solutions to these problems, many english teachers have made great efforts to take different measures to deal with english writing in class.a. facilitating writing with varying activities communicative language teaching is best

52、understood as an approach, not a method. it is a unified but broadly based theoretical position about the nature of language and of language learning and teaching. the range of exercises types and activities compatible with a communicative approach is unlimited, provided that such exercises enable t

53、he students to attain the communicative objectives of the curriculum, engage students in communication, and require the use of such communicative process as information sharing, negotiation of meaning, and interaction. during the four main stages of writing, the writing teacher activates various act

54、ivities to teach students problem-solving skills to understand the nature of writing at every point, to enable them to realize specific goals at every stage of the composing process. he may choose among brainstorming, strip story, jigsaw writing, ranking, delayed copying, cloze-text, pair-group work

55、, to name only a few. but the specific strategies he chooses must be appropriate for warming up the students, storming information or ideas, organizing structures, developing transmission, responding and sharing, moreover, he should be aware that he is modeling the writing process at every stage, re

56、lating the process to the product through meaningful and communicative classroom activities.b. promoting writing together with other language skills part of the reason why chinas middle school students can not develop their writing competence to a satisfactory level is that, writing has long been ta

57、rred with anelitist brush and reserved for the most advanced level of learning. the separation of writing from other language skills not only impedes the concurrent development of holistic language competence, but also deprives writing of its communicative function. as vice and line noted,to find me

58、aning and purpose in learning, students must be encouraged to think about what they are learning and therein lies the power of writing.5 by integrating writing with other language learning activities, students will find that what they learn can be put to immediate use in their every life. they will

59、be actively involved and motivated in language learning, especially in writing.c. revision of the objectives of middle school english writing as an authoritative guiding line for middle school english teaching/learning, the national syllabus of middle school english teaching should be frequently modi