The Application Of Recitation To Non-English Majors’ English Writing Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Over the past decade, recitation as one of the traditional Chinese teaching principles hasbeen concerned by an increasing number of English researchers. According to Van Pattern(Skehan, 1998),“language input”should covert into“language intake”, otherwise, thelanguage acquisition can not occur. Besides, the“language intake”must be characterized by“frequently”and“saliently”repetition, which finally leads to its effective“internalization”.Akinson Shiffrin (1968) also classified human memory and pointed out that the only way tostore information in the long-term memory is through“rehearsal”. Many theories andresearches home and abroad show that the learners can learn target knowledge, accumulateimplicit knowledge and get rid of negative transfer of mother tongue through recitation.Recitation has special significance for non-English majors in English learning under theChinese environment.Based on the previous studies, the present study reviewed some of related theories ofrecitation input in writing, recitation output in writing, Bialystok’s distinction of explicit andimplicit knowledge, which help to lay a solid foundation for this study. The experiment wasdesigned to answer the research questions as follows: 1) Is recitation an effective way toimprove English writing performance of the non-English majors in vocational colleges? 2)How does recitation affect different aspects of EFL writing performance of the non-Englishmajors, including the holistic scoring in writing, vocabulary accuracy, grammar mistakes,sentence lengths and structures as well as passage organization respectively for non-Englishmajors in vocational colleges? 3) What pedagogical implication on English writing teachingcan be drawn from this experiment?The research data were collected through the instruments of the review of literature,writing test, questionnaire survey and interview. To further explore the effectiveness of“recitation”on EFL writing, the author carried out an experimental study in Jinan VocationalInstitute from September 2011 to January 2012. 61 non-English majors from two normalclasses served as subjects (EG = 30, CG =31). Besides the routine curriculum, 30 students inthe experimental class were required to recite the English texts excerpted from New ConceptEnglish (Book 3). All the data collected are inserted into SPSS (17.0) for analysis. Through the analysis and discussion of the data, the major findings of the study aresummarized as follows:1. Results in the present study show that recitation practice increases students’holisticscores, vocabulary accuracy, sentence lengths and structures as well as passage organization.Recitation practice is able to promote EFL writing at three levels. As for vocabulary level,recitation of vocabulary in the context enables students to process vocabulary deeply andmeaningfully, which leads to flexible usage of English words during EFL writing. At thesentence level, recitation practice helps students to internalize more sentences patterns andstructures, which results in the improved English sentences during EFL writing. Students aremore likely to write longer sentences with more varied structures. At the passage level,recitation practice activates text schemata and therefore students know more skills about howto organize the essays when they are writing. However, at the grammar level, the positiveeffectiveness of recitation on EFL writing is not so obvious.2. Questionnaire provides some information about students’attitudes, personal feelingsand viewpoints toward the impact of recitation input. After implementing recitation task,most students admit that they have formed a good habit of reviewing, which is of importancein learning language. As for methods used after implementing recitation task, most studentsregarded recitation task as a meaningful learning experience rather than rote-learning.Besides, silent rehearsal is also widely used, which compared with other methods. Afterreciting task for one school term, most students find that they benefit a lot from this practice.Students in the EG are not only satisfied with their general English performances, but alsobuild up more confidence in their EFL writing.3. It can be elicited from the interview that, most of the subjects show clear positiveattitude toward reciting, regarding it as an effective way of practicing written English;however, they think that recitation is indeed a very difficult task that requires learners tocomplete in patience and perseverance. When completing the recitation task, it is essentialthat the learner’s task performance should be checked and supervised with the help ofteachers.4. It can be concluded from this study that implications on EFL writing teaching fornon-English majors in vocational colleges are as follows: Text recitation is found to be a compensation for the lack of native English environment since students have to spendadditional time to deal with this task. Teachers can use this practice and method to make upfor limited class hours in writing teaching since the declarative knowledge obtained from textrecitation is the important mental preparation for EFL writing.