Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
It is widely recognized that the proficiency of writing is one of the mostimportant standards to assess a successful English learner. Also, it is the mostdemanding one among the four skills, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing.However, the proficiency of English writing in two cities, Xinyi, anunderdeveloped city in the southwest of Guangdong and Guangzhou differentiatesfrom each other dominantly, even though they are using the same syllabus and textbooks. According to the statistics from English Department of Xinyi EducationBureau (2015), senior students from this county score 4 marks lower than those in theeconomically developed big cities like Guangzhou in English writing in NationalMatriculation English Test (NMET), which has become one of the main reasons thatlead to the gap of the students’English proficiency between these two cities.Exploring the situation of English teaching in Xinyi may give us some clues tofigure out what contributes to the unsatisfactory English writing outcome, apart fromthe geography and economy factors. Talking with some teachers, the author assumesthat the approaches that the teachers adopt in teaching English writing may be a majorreason.Actually, according to the survey in Xinyi by Zhang (2015), most of the teachersin this area adopted a traditional approach which is called the product approach inteaching English writing. Often in this approach, at the beginning of the lesson, theteacher gives a writing task; then he/she offers students a written text and then teachesthe sentence patterns in it and at last asks students to write an essay in a fixed timeperiod and hand it in to the teachers after finishing. Although existing for quite a longtime, the Product Approach brings about some problems especially when the number of students in a class becomes larger and larger.
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1.2 Research Purpose
From what have been discussed above, currently the situation of English writingin senior high school of Xinyi is far from satisfactory. So a suitable approach, theProcess Approach should be applied to English writing teaching in senior high school.Even though the Process Approach has been testified valid and applied widely incolleges in China, proofs of application in senior high school is limited andinadequate, especially with the senior students from some underdeveloped area.The purpose of this study was to examine how the Process Approach functions inEnglish writing courses in senior high school. Specifically, the study concentrated onobserving the variations of the students’ writing proficiency before and after theimplementation of process writing approach. By exploring the writing situations andattitudes towards English writing after the implementation of process writingapproach, the study investigates the transformation of writing anxiety.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter is literature review. Firstly, English writing proficiency and itsmeasurements are presented. And then researches on English writing teaching homeand abroad are shown, and finally the definition of process approach and itsresearches on English writing teaching are illustrated.
2.1 English Writing Proficiency
According to the National English Curriculum Standards (2003), English writingproficiency is also described as English writing ability and sometimes English writingperformance or English writing development and it concerns about how skilled thewriter is in applying knowledge and strategies to accomplish the given task consistingof the cover of the writing task, correctness in grammar, cohesion in paragraph.In this way, English writing proficiency not only refers to the ability to expressone's ideas in written English but also involves with the process that the author makesefforts to finish the task by communicating with surroundings including the task itself,peer students and teachers.English writing is a kind of creative activity which is to produce v
