The Inlfuence Of Model Text Recitation And Imitation On The Writing Ability Of Grade Three Senior School Students

During middle school, students are demanded to master the four skills—listening, speaking,reading and writing, of which listening and reading belong to language input while speakingand writing are kind of language output. As far as senior three students, writing is the veryone that can reflect students’English level but cannot be improved in a short time. It appearsin the form of Guided Writing when students take the college entrance examination. Guidedwriting is a kind of question types that focus on students’ability in using the language, whichdemands students to write an essay according to the given situation and demands as well asusing vocabulary, set phrases, sentence patterns learnt through learning. What’s important, theessay can clearly express students’ideas (the Ministry of Education test center). After learningEnglish systematically for six years(generally speaking, three years for junior and three yearsfor senior) in middle school, students are expected to write an essay which is rich in contentand fluent in language. Besides, there should be no obvious grammar mistakes and the articleought to be 120 to 150words in length. According to the New Curriculum (2003) issued bythe Ministry of Education in Aug, 2001, students should reach the following standard inwriting: students can give a brief description of information, attitudes or scenes usingcharacters and diagrams given ahead; they should have the ability to write notice, letters aswell as short summaries of articles. Besides, students are supposed to fill in the formsconcerning personal information, for example, application forms. What’s more, they areexpected to adapt texts into short plays in groups.But limited by studying environment, different conditions as well as study aim and method,second language learning and foreign language learning are quite different from nativelanguage learning. At present, students in China mainly depend on textbooks and teacherswhen they learn English. Therefore there is a limit to the language input. Meanwhile, seniorthree students are not performing well in writhing as we have expected. Some of them cannotuse vocabulary correctly, and mix sentences together. Others do not know grammar, whichresults in many mistakes in writing. On how to improve students’marks in guided writing aswell as students’writing ability, many experts and teachers bring up many theories andmethods, of which some are practical while others have little to do with middle schoolteaching.This essay, combining study characteristics of senior school students and the presentsituation, which makes use of the common points of Chinese and English, brings up“ModelRecitation and Imitation”strategy, hoping to introduce the learning method of mother tongueinto second language learning. And during the process, there are some pointed training in language output. The final aim is to help senior three students to find a practical way ofimproving their writing skills based on their basis of former learning.Through studying the Input Hypothesis Theory of Krashen, the Output Hypothesis Theoryof Swain, Second Language Learning Theory as well as Behavioral Imitate Theory, the authormakes full preparations for the theory basis of this study by combining knowledge ofLinguistics and cognitive learning.This essay employs methods like literature research, interviews and experiment. The writerhas read lots of monographs, degree essays, research essays and journals, making it possibleto improve the writing. The experiment is conducted among senior three students during 12weeks. The data was then analyzed by SPSS16.0 to make sure it is scientific and reasonable.Through the above analysis, the author spots that“Model recitation and imitation”is ofgreat help and use to senior three students, thus confirming the former hypothesis“Modelrecitation and imitation can help improve senior three students’writing ability”. And as to theproblems arising from imitation, some practical ways are given as well.This study can be of some use for reference in the teaching of English writing. It is hopedthat more scholars and teachers make further research in this field so as to find more practicalways for the benefit of students’writing ability.