A Study On The Efficacy Of Text-reciting For The Development Of High School Students' English Writing Ability

The new curriculum for High School requires that students should develop their comprehensive English language ability. Though the reform has been on for several years, yet in fact, students' ability hasn't been well cultivated, especially in English writing. For so many English teachers, it is essential and urgent to find out an efficacious teaching method to help students improve their writing ability. Based on the theory of Cognitive Psychology and the theory of Krashen's Input Hypothesis, the thesis aims to examine the actual efficacy of text-reciting input in developing High School students' writing ability.The thesis first introduces the background of the study, analyzes the current situation of the teaching of English writing in High School and points out writing is neither much valued nor taught in an appropriate way in high schools, which results in many problems existing in students' writing, such as a small vocabulary, a lack of variety in sentence patterns, a poor sense of English grammar and improper structures and so on. Having considered the demand of English writing in the New English Curriculum for Chinese Senior Middle Schools and having referred to current research results on this topic both abroad and at home, we suggest that it is necessary to integrate writing practice with text-reciting. In order to verify the effect of this approach, the author carried out an experiment that lasted for 28 weeks, which included a pre-test of composition, a post-test of composition and an interview on text-reciting. Besides, the data from the experiment were collected and analyzed by SPSS 13.0. The results show the composition scores of the experimental group are obviously higher than those of the control group. The author can conclude that text-reciting is efficacious in improving the quality of input language and improving senior students' English writing proficiency.The study provides important implications for the teaching of English writing in senior high schools:while we explore teaching theories and methods of English writing at present, we should positively maintain the very essence of our traditional teaching methods and make full use of recitation input in the teaching of English writing in an effort to facilitate the development of high school students' English writing.