II. The Current Situation of Senior One Students’ English Writing  

2.1 Writing’s Role in Language Learning

English plays an indispensable role in real life. If one wants to master and apply English, he must have an excellent ability to listen, speak, read and write in English, while writing is often considered to be the most difficult part. Writing, as one of comprehensive ability of using language, should be paid the same attention as listening, speaking and reading.

Writing, as a form of language output, can better show students’ comprehensive ability of using language. Therefore, writing has become an essential part of written test, while in this part students have lost the most points. English writing examines students’ application of comprehensive ability in vocabulary, grammar, structure and thinking. With the emphasis on English, situation writing is gradually increasing, which means that writing examines not only the theory but also the combination between theory and practice. What’s more, English teachers should put more efforts in order that let students lay a good foundation in English learning.

2.2 The Characteristics of Senior One Students’ English Writing    

As we all know, writing, reflecting one’s level of foreign language, is the most difficult in terms of four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Writing is both important and difficult, so it is inevitable for students to make errors. The key is to find out the reasons and look for solutions to these problems.

The current situation of English writing is not satisfying: Students’ writing skill is not the same; Students are afraid of English writing and get low scores; Teachers are hurt by compositions students have written. These phenomena are extremely common. Although English writing is paid more attention, teachers don’t have a deep and clear understanding of students’ writing skills and difficulties because they don’t pay attention to the process of writing but the results. English writing is a training of comprehensive ability, so cramming for test is not desirable. English writing has a big portion in Nation Matriculation Tests, while the status quo is not optimistic. Due to lack of adequate training in English writing for some students, they either don’t know how to begin with or casually write what they want, then causing the occurrence of various errors. Besides, a lot of students lacks enthusiasm of writing. The reason for this phenomenon is that they don’t develop the interest of learning English in junior high school and gradually lose the confidence in English. Therefore, the current situation that students’ ability of English writing is generally low is worth noticing.