Writing, considered as all indispensable part of English learning. remains a notoriously weak component of English language teaching in middle schools. Consequently, the English writing ability of middle school students in China has long been staying poor as a striking deficiency in their writing, which is frequently revealed in their interlanguage full of expressions with Chinese characteristics. In order to improve the teaching of English writing, a substantial body of research has been devoted to the theoretical and pedagogic aspects of his area,exploring problems in students’English writing and examining major barriers in the development of their writing ability. However, few empirical studies in this area have focused on senior middle school students and it is necessary to conduct a study with a sample selected from them.Attempting to investigate the difficulties and problems of senior middle school students in English writing, this study is devoted to exploring the possibility of utilizing English newspaper reading(ENR) in English writing classes to develop students’English writing skills. It is motivated with second language acquisition theories, among which are Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’s output Hypothesis. The former stresses the crucial role of a large amount of comprehensible input while the latter advocates the driving force of comprehensible output in pushing learners’development of productive skills.This study develops all experiment design with the aim to seek answers to the following questions: 1)Can ENR arouse0 students’writing interest?2)Can ENR enrich students’productive vocabulary?3)Can ENR enhance the students’ability in textual organization? The subjects were 110 Senior-One students in two classes of ShiJi Middle School in ZhunGeer, with one assigned as the experimental class and the other as the control class. They participated the study from September,2004 to April,2005. In the study, the two classes took the pretest, posttest and delayed test of English writing. Meanwhile, the students in the experimental class were asked to complete a questionnaire and were interviewed before and after the experiment. The collected data were analyzed through Statistic Description and Independent-samples T-tests in SPSS 11.5.The statistic analyses of the data collected from the experimental class and the control class generate the major findings: 1)The ENR activities were enthusiastically accepted by the students in the experimental class with great interest both in reading and writing. 2)The ENR activities enabled the students in the experimental class to learn English vocabulary more effectively.3)The ENR activities raised the students’awareness of discourse and helped them significantly improve their discourse organization skills in writing. The results of the T-test further reveal that the students in the experiment significantly outperformed those in the control class in all the measurements.After examining these research findings of this experiment, great insight has been gained into English language teaching in middle schools, which will significantly benefit both the teaching of reading and the teaching of writing:First, a great quantity of authentic language input proves to underlie the development of students’English proficiency. Therefore, it is desirable to substantially increase such input in English language teaching. Second, the integration of reading and writing has been witnessed as all effective approach to the development of students’English writing ability. It is expected to strengthen the integration of the teaching of reading and that of writing in pedagogic practice to optimize the teaching of English writing. Third, the adoption of English newspaper reading for maximizing the functioning of writing classes is found to be remarkably effective in cultivating students capability of using English comprehensively. It is advisable to do further research on the adoption of this approach in a greater variety of English writing classes.