An Empirical Study On English Imitation Writing In Senior High School

Writing teaching is an essential component of senior high school teaching,and one key factor which affects writing teaching effect is teaching method.Imitation writing is the process of assimilation,retention,expression and transmission of excellent language memes in a model text.Studies have shown that imitation writing can effectively improve student’s writing grades,relieve their anxiety in writing and so on.However,most researchers have not adopted the method to measure student’s writing from the dimension of complexity and accuracy.The present study,by analyzing the complexity and accuracy of their writing output,aims to explore the influence of imitation writing on senior high school student’s performance,and further instruct teaching.The present study is to answer the following two questions:1.What effects does imitation writing have on student’s language complexity?2.What effects does imitation writing have on student’s language accuracy?In view of the above two research questions,the present study takes the students of two parallel classes in Grade two as research objects and carries out a 16-week long experiment of imitation writing teaching.The overall performance of the two classes before the experiment is similar.The two classes are randomly divided into the experimental class and the control class,who received imitation writing teaching and conventional writing teaching respectively.After the experiment,students’ writings are analyzed by statistical software L2 SCA,L2LCA,Grammarly and SPSS26.0 to get the statistics,based on which we analyze the effects of imitation writing on student’s writing complexity and fluency,and discuss the underlying reasons concerning the two theoretical basis.The study finds that imitation writing effectively improves the value of the syntactic complexity metrics MLT(mean length of T-unit),C/S(clause per sentence),CT/T(complex T-units per T-unit),CN/C(complex nominals per clause),but fails to improve the value of CP/T(coordinate phrase per T-unit)effectively.The result means that students,though unable to produce more coordinate phrases,are able to produce longer T-units and more clauses and complex nominals.Imitation writing also has significantly positive effects on the lexical complexity metrics LD(lexical density)and MSTTR(mean segmental type-token ratio),but not on LS1(lexical sophistication 1).The result means that,after receiving imitation writing,students are able to produce more content words and word types in their writing.As to accuracy,the EFT/T(error-free T-units / T-units)value was significantly improved and students can produce more correct T-units in their writing.At the same time,imitation writing,through reducing the ratio of lexical and sentence errors,improves student’ writing accuracy.However,it has little effect on reducing student’s morphological errors.The influences of imitation writing on improving the complexity and accuracy of student’s writing are related to its own characteristics.First,the authentic and classic memetic materials for imitative writing are selected from the textbook,and their length and difficulty are within the i+1range of the students.In addition,students can conduct several individual or group imitation writing activities at each stage of meme transmission.Therefore,the quality of the input is well guaranteed.Second,students in the process of imitation writing will write creatively according to their previous knowledge and experience,which can effectively promote their absorption of the language.Finally,student’s excellent writings can be disseminated throughout the class,which helps students to learn from each other,increase their interest,and promote or improve their writings in return.