A Study Of The Combination Of Reading And Writing Developing Senior Students' Summarizing Ability

In English learning, writing has been regarded as the most difficult skill for senior students to acquire.Therefore, writing a summary of an English passage within four or five minutes is even a much tougher task. And this is just one part of a new English writing test in the College Entrance Exam in Gongdong province.However, rare investigations or researches in middle schools have been conducted on it, which is the very purpose of the research. This study, based on an experiment for Senior high school students in Grade Two of Chongya Middle School in Huizhou GuangDong, intends to explore an effective and feasible learning strategie of summary-writing for the senior high school learners in China.The study is based on the theories of Krashen's comprehensive input and Swain's comprehensive output, according to which, reading and writing are two reciprocal acts of comprehending and composing, mutually facilitative entities that support each other. This thesis focuses on the main problems in students'reading and summary-writing, trying to train the students'summarizing skills by improving their reading comprehension, developing their abilities of finding topic sentences or generalizing main ideas of passages.Through the theoretical exploration and empirical research, the thesis demonstrates a conscious process of teaching in reading and writing and targeted training is an effective way in promotion of summary-writing skills.The research methodology in this study includes qualitative and quantitative studies,such as literature review, interview and experimental study. The review of related theories of second language acquisition, as well as the academic dissertations in journals, helps lay a solid foundation for this study. Meanwhile, an experiment lasting 8 months has been designed and carried out to figure out what effect reading and writing skills'training has on student's summary-writing proficiency.The result of the study demonstrates that reading and generalizing can be implemented as an important element in high school's English summary-writing learning. The interview also reveals that most of the students have a positive attitude towards the training, but supervision is greatly needed during the process.