写长法在独立院校学生中英语写作应用的实证研究

An Experimental Research on Length Approach to English Writing for College Students in Independent College

Abstract： writing is one of an important part for English learning， especially for CET-4 and CET-6. Most scholars do some research on this issue. While this paper applies the length-approach to teaching English teaching and the author makes an empirical study on this approach， hoping by applying this approach to improve the writing abilities of college students in independent college.

Key words： length approach； English writing； college students； writing abilities

中国分类号：H31

1. Introduction

Writing is one of the basic skills for language learning no matter what languages you are learning. The teachers try their best to improve the students’ writing skills. But the effect seems not satisfactory. Most teachers are familiar with the two traditional approaches for teaching writing： the process approach and the product approach. According to Lu（2002）， he argues that the reason why the students cannot write a perfect composition or composition satisfied with themselves or the teachers is that teaching attaches more importance to the input teaching rather than output.

2. The definitions of the length approach.

LA was first proposed by Wang Mingchun（1991）. The LA encourages learners not only write but also to write as long as they possibly can. The length of a L2 composition has been found to bear a close relationship with the quality of writing. Crowhurst（1991） claims that length influences the overall quality of essays and one of the effective indicators of L2 learners’ level of writing ability.

3. Research questions

As for the purpose of this research， it mainly focuses on the following questions.

（1） Whether the length approach is useful for improving the comprehensive abilities of senior high students or not？

（2） Whether the length approach is helpful for improving the writhing levels of senior high students or not？

The subjects participate this research are college students in grade 2 Two different classes are chosen and are regarded as experimental class and control class. The experimental class composed of twenty three male students and twenty seven female students. While the control class twenty four male students and twenty six female students.

4 Conclusions

This paper has described the procedures involved in the length approach and years’ teaching using the approach has afforded evidence for its effectiveness. Behind the length-manipulating technique lies a host of beliefs and principles about EFL learning and teaching. In this principled approach， use of the LA to improve English proficiency accords with Swain’s （1995， p. 141） view on the three L2 learning functions which output serves， that is， the functions of gap-noticing， hypothesis-testing， and reflection.

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