Teaching Figures Of Speech In EFL Writing For Senior High Students

Since the new century, the enthusiasm for learning English has still been on the rise. Chinese senior high students are required to be proficient at writing skill with the increasing popularity of the Internet, more frequent communications between China and other countries, greater ambition of going abroad for further study and harsher requirements of the College Entrance Examination. Of the four basic skills of language learning, the importance of writing skills can never be emphasized too much. However, more efforts of teachers sometimes only lead to half the job. Therefore, based on the traditional advantage", it has become urgent that we high school teachers seek new modes of teaching EFL writing skills to develop students' writing competence with the help of the latest theoretical and empirical achievements in pedagogy, psychology and English language teaching.Figures of speech refer to rhetorical devices such as simile, metaphor, personification, etc. It's part of rhetoric in writing and considered as either diction or change of sentence patterns in the writing process. There are dozens of figures of speech in English and the author employs twelve of them to teach writing, which are suitable for the language proficiency of senior high students. By teaching these common figures of speech, the author helps students to better appreciate these figures of speech, learn to evaluate and edit writings of the peer and eventually improve their overall writing skills.This paper is composed of five chapters. Chapter One mainly deals with the significance and background of this research. Chapter Two introduces the origin and development of western rhetoric and elaborates the theoretical framework of the study. Chapter Three expounds 12 common figures of speech in accordance with the aptitudes of senior high students and explores new modes of integrating figures of speech into EFL writing in senior high schools. Chapter Four presents the analysis of teaching results with the help of questionnaires, case study as well as the empirical study with a view to discovering the correlation between the new mode of teaching writing and students' academic performance. Chapter Five puts forward the major results and reflection of the study.This empirical study targets 78 Senior Three students as subjects and focuses on how to improve students' writing competence through the teaching of figures of speech. Statistics show that most of the students in the experimental group have demonstrated a better knowledge of figures of speech in English and their writing performance is also significantly better. The application of figures of speech to English writing is found to be closely correlated to students' performance in writing. Thus, the author can safely draw the conclusion that the teaching of figures of speech in EFL writing for senior high students can lead to greater interest in language learning, better diction, more changes in sentence patterns and better organization of the passage as a whole.