A Study On The Development Of English Writing Proficiency Of Senior High School Students Based On The IRE C-Model

Writing,as one of the most important language skills,has always been at the heart of English language teaching.Fruitful research results have been yielded in English writing teaching in high school at home and abroad,but most of them focus on traditional writing teaching methods,such as the Product-based Approach and the Process-based Approach.Traditionally,teachers mainly place emphasis on the linear syntax in students’ compositions,such as word spelling and grammatical errors,ignoring the role of the interaction and mapping relationship between clauses in the discourse on the overall textual coherence and layout.As a result,students’ ability of discourse coherence is weak and their learning interest is low.The idea of cross-sentence interaction and mapping was first mentioned by Du Bois in his Dialogic Syntax Theory(DS)in 2014.Since then,it has drawn a lot of attention from researchers.However,since its emergence,DS has been used mainly in the study of conversation in oral discourse,and rarely in the study of writing instruction.Hence,this study argues that applying the DS to the teaching of continuation task can motivate students to produce target utterances and thus achieve discourse coherence in their writing by reusing the structural form and meaning of the underlying sentences in the discourse.Additionally,Wang’ s(2016)“Continuation Theory” advocates that students should imitate the linguistic expressions in the reading material in a selective way in order that they can trigger the levelling effect and then complete the continuation task.Therefore,it can be seen that ‘imitating’ is the core idea of ‘Continuation Theory’,and the process of imitating is bound to trigger the dialogic resonance in the process of reading and writing.Nevertheless,despite the fact that Continuation Theory highlights the importance of ‘imitating’ in second language learning,it neglects the cognitive motivation and formation mechanism behind language expressions.Thus,adopting DS to guide the teaching of English writing in high school can be satisfactory for the improvement of the current situation of writing teaching to a certain extent.In view of this,this study proposes a new writing teaching mode,namely ‘IRE CModel’(Inputting Resonating Extending Continuation-Model)based on DS.The overarching claim is that it emphasizes students’ selective imitation in response to the priming effect brought by the source text to produce target sentences,and then achieve discourse coherence while writing.Besides,this model could also help students foster their writing interest and meanwhile,improve the present situation of writing teaching in China.In this study,there are 96 participants,all of whom are from two parallel classes in the second year of a senior high school in Chongqing.One is the experimental class and the other control class.The researcher conducted a 14-week teaching experiment to investigate whether the writing instruction based on the IRE C-Model could improve students’ writing scores,word choice,sentence-making,ability of discourse coherence,as well as their writing interest.In line with the above contentions,the three research questions are stated below:(1)Does the high school English writing teaching mode based on the IRE C-Model have effects on students’ writing scores?(2)Does the high school English writing teaching mode based on the IRE C-Model improve students’ ability of word selection,sentence formation and discourse coherence in writing?(3)Does the high school English writing teaching mode based on the IRE C-Model enhance students’ English writing interest?Based on data analysis and discussion,major findings of this study can be summarized as follows:(1)The IRE C-Model can be successfully applied to high school English writing teaching to improve students’ writing scores;(2)The IRE CModel for high school English writing teaching can enhance students’ ability of word choice,sentence formation and discourse coherence;(3)In comparison with the traditional writing instruction,the IRE C-Model can raise students’ writing interest and motivation more effectively,and at the same time,optimize students’ writing habits to a certain extent.Overall,this study offers some new enlightenments on the teaching of foreign language writing from the perspective of DS so as to explore more effective writing teaching methods.