2.1 Creative Thinking 2

2.1.2 Educational Philosophy 2

2.1.3 Teaching of Creative Thinking 2

2.1.4 Characteristics of Students' Creativity in Junior High Schools 3

2.2 English Writing 3

2.2.1 Writing 3

2.2.2 English Writing Process 4

2.2.3 Teaching Approaches in Second Language Teaching Writing 5

2.3 Relationship Between Creative Thinking and Writing 5

3.Methodologies 6

3.1 Participant 6

3.2 Procedure 6

3.3 Measurement Tools 6

4. Result & Discussion 7

4.1 Analysis About the Writing Course and Writing Results 7

4.2 Analysis About the Creativity Test (TTCT) 8

4.3 Analysis About the Questionnaire & the Interest Survey 8

5.Conclusion & Suggestions 9

5.1 Conclusion 9

5.2 Suggestions 9

References 11

1. Introduction

1.1 Background

In China, the current education system has made clear statements that goals of English teaching are to inspire students' enthusiasm and interests in learning, to improve their self-learning and cooperative learning abilities, to develop their integrating skills of using English. Four basic skills-- listening, speaking, reading and writing are as important as English knowledge. However, as one of the basic skills, English writing in middle schools doesn't get enough attention. In the current education system, cognition and exam-oriented education are given too much attention, compared with the cultivation in creativity. As a result, Chinese students generally are good at convergent thinking but weak in pergent thinking. Besides,  the following predicaments occur during the teaching process of English writing: teaching materials are usually in monotonous forms (generally are blank filling and imitation); writing tests in the exam often use semi-open propositions; result approach plays a dominant role in the writing class, which emphasizes the accurate use of vocabulary, syntax and cohesion; the great majority of students hate writing. All those may cause the problems in students' writings-- problems like fuzzy expression, lack of vocabulary, single sentence patterns, and so on. Meanwhile, one serious phenomenon should be noticed, that is, the compositions written by different students are quite similar to each other, and some even the same as the article in the textbook. That means many students don't express their own ideas in their compositions, which is possibly because of lack of creative thinking.

In order to cultivate students creative thinking in English writing, the most important task is to change teachers' teaching concept and improve the writing class. Various studies, about how to develop students' English writing skills or how to promote students' interests in English writing, have been carried out. But researches about the cultivation of students' creative thinking, especially in English writing, have not been as extensive as expected. Modern teaching perception believes that offering student basic theory and basic knowledge is an important aim of education but not the only one. While enhancing the fundamental teaching, it is more important to develop students' thinking, especially creative thinking. As the saying goes, delegate to fish in the fishery as delegate.