The Effect Of Peer Collaborative Prewriting Discussion On English Grammatical Accuracy In High School Students’Writing

For a long time,promoting grammar learning of language learners has been a key issue in the research of Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition,in which grammatical accuracy is the focus of researchers.In English writing,learners need to pay close attention to both meaning and form.Thus the importance of grammatical accuracy speaks for itself.At present,relevant researches on second language acquisition suggest that language can be learned and taught in an interactive way.Under the background of the Task-based Language Teaching Approach,collaborative learning is a crucial learning concept and method developed in education in recent years.As a practical language teaching method,collaborative writing still has much room to explore.The current literature has revealed that most researches focus on the writing process or the feedback and evaluation after writing,and there is little discussion on the students’ interaction before their writing.Thus,based on argumentative writing,this thesis probes into the effect of collaborative prewriting discussion on the English grammatical accuracy in high school students’ writing.And the research questions are as follows.1.Does collaborative prewriting discussion improve the grammatical accuracy of collocation(V.+N.,Adj.+N.,Adv.+Adj.)in the writings by senior high school tudents?2.Does collaborative prewriting discussion improve the grammatical accuracy of ense(the simple past tense,the simple present tense,the present perfect tense nd the simple future tense)in the writings by senior high school students?In response to the above questions,this thesis took students from two classes in Grade 2 of Tianshui No.1 Middle School as the research subjects and conducted a 14-week experiment.Collaborative prewriting discussion was implemented in the experimental class,while the traditional writing was carried out in the control class.In this thesis,a combination of both quantitative and qualitative research methods was primarily adopted,including two writing tests and an interview.And the data obtained were processed and analyzed using SPSS.The results manifest that collaborative prewriting discussion positively affected the accuracy of collocation and tense in argumentative writings by senior high school students.It can also be seen from the interviews that the vast majority of students in the experimental class were highly satisfied with the collaborative prewriting discussion and believed that it could stimulate their thinking,enhance their participation in the classroom and improve their grammatical accuracy.Collaborative prewriting discussion created an opportunity for students to learn collaboratively before writing.The peer scaffolding in discussion helped students better plan the writing and guide the actual writing to improve the quality of their writing.Meanwhile,the interaction in the process of collaborative prewriting discussion provided students with the opportunity for meaning negotiation,and the errors could be noticed and corrected in time,thereby improving the accuracy.According to the students’ writing texts,the author analyzed why students misuse tense and collocation from the perspectives of internal and external causes.The internal causes for collocation misuse were attributed to language itself and learners,while the external causes involved the transmission of wrong memes and the fact that teachers ignored collocation teaching.Besides,the internal causes for tense misuse were language itself and learners.The external causes were analyzed from the view of differences in time concept between Asians and westerners to explain its impact on tense learning of Chinese learners.Lastly,the implications for English teaching are presented and the limitations of this study discussed.