On The Effectiveness Of Recitation In English Teaching

In the modern times, the new English teaching methods appear like bamboos in spring. Teaching methods or strategies are applied to improve classroom teaching quality and students' language competence in communication. The data from domestic has proved that recitation plays a significant role in foreign language teaching and learning. Researches done by the scholars at home and abroad are almost in the university or in the senior high school. However, little has been done in the junior high school.The author does a research on recitation in rural junior school to testify the effectiveness of English recitation and its improvement of learners' integrative skills in performance. The paper begins with the definitions of recitation from some world-famous dictionaries and the requirement by the English Curriculum Standards, presents four basic theories, such as Krashen's Input Hypothesis, the Information-process Theory, language learning theory and lexical chunking approach, introduces some researches done by scholars at home and abroad, conducts a 40-day-experiment in a rural school of Hui'an County from May 20th to July 1st and presents the satisfactory results, and then makes some comments on instructions of recitation and proves that recitation can reduce learners' anxiety, promote language awareness, help acquire the target language, form the habit of thinking in English, develop the ability of understanding, and improve both receptive and productive skills. Study shows that recitation is no longer outdated and useless; learners in rural areas can improve their English if they are required to recite some texts; teachers of English who pay much attention to the recitation can solve the problem of students' insufficient input in English learning. The author believes that this study does a favor for English learners in China, especially for students in rural areas because English learning in such areas lacks of communicative environment and recitation does promote students' language input and affect their performance in English learning.