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Avoidance Phenomenon In English Writings Of Senior High School Students

Posted on:2013-01-25Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y T LiaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2247330371975544Subject:Subject teaching
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Avoidance phenomenon is a special phenomenon emerged in second language acquisition. It was first brought to light by Schachter in her research on4groups of English learners of different language. Since then, avoidance became an issue in heated debate in second language acquisition. There were a serial of empirical studies and theoretical research done by many language teachers and researchers, including its advocates and opponents. There are tons of researches home and abroad. But researches on the avoidance phenomenon in the compositions of Chinese middle school students are rare. Therefore, considering the importance of writing in English learning, this study investigates the avoidance phenomenon and its effect on the written productions of Chinese middle school students to the benefit of English teaching.Both qualitative research and quantitive research were adopted in this study. It was conducted among a second year middle school in Beijing and a senior year in Shihezi, Xinjiang respectively. The research questions brought up were as follows:1) Do senior high school students adopt avoidance behavior in their writings?2) If so, what are the manifestations of avoidance?3) If so, why do they adopt avoidance behavior?A composition task and questionnaires are adopted in this study. The research data was classified and analyzed, the major findings are as follows:1) Avoidance phenomenon does exist in the written productions of Chinese middle school students. But the findings are slightly different from the previous researches. The avoidance behavior in vocabulary was actually due to ignorance rather than avoidance.2) Avoidance phenomenon exists in other language structures, for example: grammatical structures, sentence structures and tense, etc.3) The causes of avoidance can be attributed to L1and L2differences, emotional aspects of students, the lack of enough input, problems in standardized test, etc. therefore, the author suggested that teachers need to encourage and guide students to increase their input. The deeper meanings of compositions should be emphasized instead of word numbers and "not-making-error".However, due to the limitations of the research itself, there is still much room for further research regarding avoidance phenomenon in specific language structures.
Keywords/Search Tags:English writing, avoidance phenomenon, input, output
PDF Full Text Request
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