An Empirical Study Of Effectiveness Of Retelling Strategy In Vocational College English Writing

English writing is an important form of language productive competence. In recent years,the study of learners’ productive ability has gradually become more and more popular in thefield of foreign language teaching. Scholars at home and abroad have made a lot of researchesfrom different angles on how to improve learners’ writing ability, but it is not sufficient. Onthe one hand, it is necessary to make continuous researches on practical and effective writingstrategies. On the other hand, most of the researches did not take vocational students asresearch subjects. Therefore, it is essential to carry out an empirical study on effective writingstrategy training applied to English writing for vocational college students, which will be ofpositively theoretical significance and practical value.The study conducts an empirical study of the retelling strategy training embedded intodaily teaching and learning process from the perspective of Information Processing Theoryand Cognitive Process Theory of Writing, according to the characteristics of current vocationalEnglish teaching and the researcher’s previous teaching experience. In order to testify theeffectiveness of retelling strategy training in improving students’ writing ability, the empiricalresearch was conducted in the first half year of2012in Shandong Radio and TelevisionUniversity and took72non-English freshmen as research subjects who were from two parallelclasses. One was chosen as the experimental class (EC) and the other was the control class(CC) randomly. The purpose of doing so is to answer the following four research questions:First, can retelling strategy have an influence on vocational students’ English writingcompetence? Second, what is the influence of the training of retelling strategy on Englishwriting ability of vocational students? Third, what effect does retelling strategy have oncontent, organization and language of students’ compositions respectively? Fourth, canvocational students properly use retelling strategy in the process of English writing aftertraining?In the concrete teaching process, the retelling strategy was employed to train the studentsin EC, while the students in CC were taught by using the routine English teaching. Theresearcher first gave students of both EC and CC a writing test for the purpose of testifying ifthere existed any differences in the writing level of two classes. Test results showed that students’ writing level had no significant difference. Then, students in EC were required toretell texts after learning each of them, and supplemented with certain related writing trainingat the same time. The students did not receive the retelling strategy training in CC but someother relevant exercises. During this research period, the researcher respectively conductedmid-test and post-test in both classes, along with a questionnaire survey conducted at the endof this research. Finally, the author input data into the computer using SPSS17.0software fordetailed statistical analysis, and then used quantitative and qualitative analysis to draw theconclusion.The experimental results show that the mean writing score in EC compared with that inCC has obviously increased, especially in language and content aspect. Although the meanscore of composition organization also has increased, it is not very significant. Therefore, thisexperiment can effectively prove that the retelling strategy training is effective to improvestudents’ English writing competence. Thus it is worthy of doing such a research bycombining the text retelling in the daily teaching with writing teaching so as to lay solidlanguage foundation for vocational college students, cultivate their writing skill and improvetheir writing ability as well.In the current study, however, the selection of samples and measurement tools and otherresearch variables still have many insufficiencies, so it remains to be explored and furtherperfected.