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While this paper is going to investigate the difficulties and problems of senior middle school students in English writing through exploring the possibility of utilizing English newspaper reading. As one of the productive skills, writing can be a good reflection of students’ overall mastery of English language learning. It is acknowledged that writing is an indispensable part of second language acquisition. This study is devoted to exploring the possibility of utilizing English newspaper reading (ENR) in English writing classes to develop students’ English writing skills by qualitative conclusion through concrete problems.
II. Theoretical Framework
2.1 Swain’s Output Hypothesis
Having conducted studies on immersion students in Canada, Swain points out that comprehensible input is not sufficient for the students to fully develop their L2 proficiency. What the students need is not only comprehensible input, but also comprehensible output (CO) if they are to improve both fluency and accuracy in their inter language. She argues that ‘‘learners need the opportunity for meaningful use of their linguistic resources to achieve full grammatical competence, and that production may encourage learners to move from semantic(top-down) to syntactic(bottom-up) processing, forcing learners to pay attention to the means of expression”(Swain 245)．She emphasizes the roles of comprehensible output as follows：Its roles are at minimum，to provide opportunities for contextualized，meaningful use．To test out hypotheses about the target language，and to move the learner from a purely semantic analysis of the language to a syntactic analysis of it．(ibid 252)
The CO hypothesis predicts that learners acquire language when there is a communicative breakdown and that learners are “pushed to use alternative means to get across-the message-precisely, coherently, and appropriately”(ibid 261).
Swain and Lapkin refined the CO hypothesis and summarized it as follows: In producing the L2，a learner will on occasion become aware of a linguistic problem．Noticing a problem “pushes” the learner to modify his/her output．In doing so, the learner may sometimes be forced into a more syntactic processing mode than might occur in comprehension．Thus，output may set “noticing” in train，triggering mental processes that lead to modified output．(Swain and Lapkin 629)