A Comparative Study Of Text Recitation And Chunk Recitation In Senior High School English Teaching

As a traditional and effective method of acquiring the first or second language, recitation has been widely practiced in China. However, in about ten years'teaching experience in a senior high school, the author feels that text recitation is being gradually replaced by chunk recitation in English study, which is also testified by the questionnaire made by the author in a senior high school. Though most students admit that text recitation may bring about better effects on English study than chunk recitation, they still tend to recite chunks instead of texts. Why? Three reasons may lead to the results. Firstly, text recitation is a process of repeated reading until saying the material completely from memory, so it may be not as entertaining as other strategies like chunk recitation. Secondly, English learning is a process of constant accumulation and internalization of language. No short-term study could bring about obvious improvement. Finally, there are no exams on text recitation, that is, whether students can recite texts will not immediately influence their academic performances. So when students make a lot of efforts and are able to recite a few texts, their English proficiency may not be obviously improved. If they can not get encouraged by their teacher or classmates, they will hardly keep on reciting texts. Instead they will choose chunk recitation, a seemingly more time-saving and relaxing strategy.But is chunk recitation really more effective for English learning than text recitation? There are still few comparative studies of the two learning strategies. Based on the lack of research in this field, the author did a 16-week study on the different effects of chunk recitation and text recitation on the improvement of senor high school students'English proficiency, which was participated by 60 Senior Two students from two parallel classes. By means of theoretical research, questionnaire and experiments, the study attempts to explore whether there is any significant difference between the effects of the two strategies and thus helps students find a better way to learn English.This thesis addresses the following questions: (1) Is there any difference between the effects of text recitation and chunk recitation on the spelling accuracy of chunks? If any, to what extent?(2) Can text recitation better facilitate the acquisition of grammatical morphemes and function words than chunk recitation? If yes, to what extent?(3) Is there any difference between the effects of text recitation and chunk recitation on the overall English proficiency of senior high school students? If any, to what extent?All the data concerned in the study were processed with the software SPSS17.0. The results show that chunk recitation is time-saving to immediate memory of the written form of chunks compared with text recitation, but text recitation plays a better role in the long-term memory than chunk recitation although there is no significant difference between the two strategies. Moreover, text recitation works significantly better on the acquisition of grammatical morphemes and function words and on the improvement of the overall English proficiency of English learners than chunk recitation.