| Writing is one of the four abilities in learning English. With the development of society, the role of writing becomes more and more important. The new standard of English curriculum (SEC) puts forward a clear demand on writing ability. Meanwhile, writing part is tested in all kinds of English exams. But it is the case that many students are weak at this productive skill. As a field of enquiry, English writing is attracting more and more attention in China. In recently years, researchers have done many studies on how to improve writing ability in different sights. But on the one hand, much more attention still should be paid to writing research. On the other hand, most researchers focused on university writing classroom, few were aimed at middle school student's writing. But we know writing teaching should be developing early so as to make a good foundation for further study.At present, there is no writing course in junior school. But the students need writing guidance to improve writing ability at the beginning of learning writing; otherwise, their writing ability will become weak. So it is urgent to find an effective and feasible writing strategy for junior students. According to many years experience and characteristic of junior school, the author thinks that if the text they just learned is written by using elaborative rehearsal strategy, it can integrate "write to learn" with "learn to write" well. But does written elaborative rehearsal strategy really work on writing ability?In Flower-Hayer's cognitive process model, its second part is the writer's long term memory. It plays an important role in writing. From Atkinson-Shiffrin's information processing model, we know that rehearsal is important in learning because the longer an item remains in working memory, the greater the chance that it will be transferred to long-term memory. According to the rehearsing manner, rehearsal can be subdivided into maintenance rehearsal (MR) and elaborative rehearsal (ER); oral rehearsal (OR) and written rehearsal (WR).Most studies on rehearsal were focused on speaking. Fewer experimental studies were on vocabulary. The studies on written elaborative rehearsal (WER) were seldom. So, the general objective of this study seeks to explore the impact of the training of written elaborative rehearsal strategy on junior student's writing ability.The subjects in the study are the students in two of eight randomly occurring classes in Grade Eight in Hui Shi Junior Middle School in Huining County. The author randomly took one of them as an experimental class (EC) and the other as a control class (CC). Before pretest, about 30 students from each class were chosen randomly as the subjects of this experiment: one was the experimental group(EG) in EC, the other was controlled group(CG) in CC. The training on written elaborative rehearsal lasted 18 weeks. The data was collected and analyzed by Han Baochen's (2000) statistical method.From the data analysis, the author found that the subjects' (in EG) progress is significant and stable. The research proves that the training of written elaborative rehearsal strategy can help students improve their writing ability.There isn't without restrictions in this research and undoubtedly more improvement should be taken into consideration in it.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief explanation of the choice of the research topic and the outline of the whole thesis. Chapter 2, 3 offers a literature review and theoretical frameworks that provides theoretical support for the thesis. Chapter 4 reports and introduces the procedure of experiment conducted by the author. Chapter 5 presents the data and results. Chapter 6 draws a conclusion to the whole thesis. It discusses the findings, some pedagogical implications and limitation of the study. References and appendixes wrap up the end of the thesis. |
PDF Full Text Request