Effect Of Sentence Translation Exercises On The Improvement Of L2 Writing Ability

Nowadays various second language writing approaches are intended for the text organization, main points, even creativity. But high school students' low. English proficiency determines their main problem is how to write a sentence. Therefore, the present study investigated the effect of sentence translation exercises on the improvement of the students' L2 writing ability. Adopting a single factor design, the researcher examined the interaction between teaching approach (traditional approach and sentence translation exercises) and writing improvement. It was hypothesized that: 1) the students in the sentence translation exercises class can improve English writing ability more effectively than those in the traditional class; 2) Compared with the traditional class, the STE class will have a better development in vocabulary, syntactic structures and correct use of grammar.Before the experiment, one questionnaire was designed for senior one, senior two, and senior three students for the inquiry of the difficulties the subjects had come across, so as to locate the main problems of the present study and seek for the solutions to the problems.Two groups of students from two classes in senior one from a school participated in the study. One class was categorized as the traditional Class, received traditional writing training, i.e. thesis development and paragraph construction . The other class that was labeled as the STE class received the sentence translation training. Both groups were required to take a pretest at the. beginning of the experiment to decide on their different writing abilities, and a posttest were given at an interval of about 14 weeks to reveal the changes as exactly as possible. Both the pretest and the posttest took as the main parameters.The results suggested that. 1) The STE can improve English writing ability more effectively than the traditional method;2) The students in STE class have a better development in vocabulary,employment of the variety of sentence structures, and formal grammar.