erdEducation Reform and Development2652-53642652-5372Bio-Byword Scientific Publishing Pty. Ltd.10.26689/erd.v8i8.15397ArticleThe ‘Back-Translation’ Teaching Method in College English Classrooms: An Empirical Study on Improving Students’ Writing Authenticity and Grammatical Precisionhttps://artdesignp.com/journal/erd/8/8/10.26689/erd.v8i8.15397ZhangLimei2026882026-09-17 Writing instruction has historically been a weak link in college English education, with the prevalence of “Chinglish” and unidiomatic expressions in student essays rooted in a lack of awareness regarding the differences between English and Chinese thinking patterns. This study introduces the “back-translation” strategy from the field of translation studies into the college English writing classroom and empirically examines its actual effectiveness in enhancing the idiomaticity and grammatical accuracy of student writing. Based on systematic differences between the two languages—such as hypotaxis versus parataxis, stative versus dynamic expressions, and passive versus active voice—this study draws upon the “input-output-comparison-reflection” cycle of back-translation. It designs a four-stage teaching path: “reading the original text → English-to-Chinese translation → Chinese-to-English back-translation → comparative analysis,” guiding students to deeply perceive the essential differences in lexical collocation, syntactic structure, information focus, and discourse organization through bidirectional translation practice. Employing a pre-test and post-test comparative design, the study utilizes authentic descriptive or narrative English texts as materials. By combining quantitative analysis of students’ back-translated texts with native-speaker corpora, it evaluates teaching effectiveness across three dimensions: lexical idiomaticity, grammatical accuracy, and syntactic complexity. The results indicate that the back-translation pedagogical approach can effectively activate students’ awareness of bilingual differences, overcome negative native-language transfer and the “Chinese anchoring effect,” and significantly improve the idiomaticity and grammatical accuracy of their writing, thereby providing a new path with both theoretical depth and operational feasibility for resolving the dilemmas in college English writing instruction.

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