The Use And Effect Of The Method Of Reading, Reciting And Imitating On The Writing Ability Of Senior Three Students

For senior students, among the four skills of English, writing is a more difficult skill than listening, speaking and reading, especially for the senior three students who are in the last crucial year. They are worried about it as writing takes up 20% in the NMET paper. Writing is also the weakest link in English teaching. The proficiency of one's English writing directly reflects the level of his/her level of English learning. How to develop English Writing has been a hot and difficult topic in the current researches. After lots of literature, related theories, and experiments about English writing have been studied thoroughly, "reading, reciting and imitating" method has been raised based on the theories of the second language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Related hypotheses were tested through a teaching experiment and a questionnaire. The following specific questions are addressed in this study:â‘ Can the"reading, reciting and imitating"method help senior three students improve English writing ability?â‘ What are the students'attitudes and opinions about the"reading, reciting and imitating"method?Accordingly, the following hypotheses are put forward in this thesis:â‘ The"reading, reciting and imitating"method can improve senior three students' English writing. There is a positive relationship between them.â‘¡The students have positive attitudes towards the"reading, reciting and imitating"method.In the experiment conducted in this study, 60 senior three students of No. three Senior Middle School in Ordos City have participated as subjects. The students were asked to recite the given material and write a similar composition according to the model structure. Through 27 writing assignments, all the scores have been recorded for analysis. To investigate the effect of the "reading, reciting and imitating" method, the students' writing examination results of a pretest and a posttest were collected. All the collected data were analyzed with the statistical instruments from SPSS 15.1. Also some comparisons of the content and errors in pretest and posttest were made. In the end, a questionnaire was employed to survey the subjects' attitudes and opinions about the "reading, reciting and imitating" method. The analysis of the Paired Sample Statistics and comparisons suggested that the method had certain influences on English writing, for the scores of the students after employing the method were higher. At the same time, results of the questionnaire suggested that the method was well received by the students. Although this research has some limitation and insufficiency due to the limitations in sample size, class hours, the researcher's ability, it still provides pedagogic implications for improving Senior Three students' English writing teaching and learning. It is hoped that enough concern could be raised to improve the level of English writing.