On The Effects Of Text Recitation In Cultivating Non-English Majors’ Writing Ability

English writing ability is one of the basic requirements of the college English syllabus.However, in exercises and examinations writing is a challenge for most college students.Students’ writing is not satisfactory. At the same time, writing is also a weak point in thecurrent teaching of college English writing. In recent years, more and more Englishresearchers have began exploring effective methods from different angles to improvestudents’ English writing skills. Recitation as a Chinese traditional method of languagelearning has a profoundly theoretical basis. However, the language input-based researches onrecitation are relatively few. This thesis attempts to apply text recitation to college Englishwriting of non-English majors to explore the influence of text recitation on English writing ofnon-English major students.This thesis is based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis, andBialystok’s theory of implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge, as well as previousresearches in exploring the effectiveness of text recitation on English writing. The authormakes use of the methods of questionnaire, interview, and experiment and selects non-Englishmajor students from a provincial University to be the subjects. The students are from the twoparallel classes in the major of automation. They are divided into experimental and controlledclasses and engaged in a10-week experiment. Based on the normal curriculum requirements,the author requires the students from the experimental class to recite texts after class andregularly checks their recitation. The controlled class is not required to recite texts. Thereciting material is selected from New Concept English Book3. The experiment aims toanswer the following three questions:1) What is the current situation of college students’ text recitation?2) How can “text recitation” affect college students’ writing?3) What aspects in writing does “text recitation” improve most?The results of the questionnaire and the interview show that the students’ attitudetowards English recitation needs inspiring and improving. Their reciting frequency is not highand lack of consciousness. The results of the writing tests demonstrate that text recitationprovides students with a lot of valid language input, which is supposed to optimize thestudents’ language output. The overall writing level has significantly improved. On theanalytical scores, there is no significant progress in passage constructing ability, but both vocabulary and grammar have been significantly improved, mainly on the vocabulary andgrammar performance of accuracy and diversity. This kind of return-to-tradition recitationteaching approach provides the students with necessary knowledge storing before theirwriting. Therefore, in the college English teaching where writing is not offered as a separatecourse, English teachers can give students regular text recitation assignments so as toeffectively improve the students’ writing ability.