Comparative Studies Of English And Chinese Sentence Patterns In Senior High School English Writing Teaching

As a method of language output, English writing is one of the four linguistic skills required in Senior High School English learning. The level of English writing, which exhibits students’competence to comprehensive apply linguistic knowledge, is vital in China’s College Entrance Examination. Hence, the importance of writing well in English has been recognized by senior school teachers and students. However, how to improve students’ability to produce a good composition is still a problem remaining to be solved due to the fact that systematic writing instruction has not been in place in senior school English education and that there has not been scientific methods of practicing and correcting writing work. On the other hand, English writing in Senior School is a controlled and instructive process. During the initial stage of learning, learners, when they try to write, will inevitably conceive Chinese sentences and translate them into English before they arrange the English sentences logically into a passage. This tendency, as a consequence, highlights the great value of a comparison between English and Chinese sentence patterns. It can be assumed that students will make fewer mistakes on sentence patterns, thus improving their ability of writing on condition that they are well equipped with knowledge of English and Chinese sentences and consciously avoid "Chinglish" while writing using contrastive analysis. Based on the assumption, the thesis adopts literature research as well as empirical research to discuss whether it is practical and effective to compare English and Chinese sentence patterns in English writing teaching.The research, lasting a semester, was performed in two classes of Grade2in Zhangzhou No.1Middle School. Of the two classes, which respectively consisted of50students, one was experimental class (EC) and the other control class (CC). During the experiment, the same routine of teaching was carried out in both classes except that only EC was exposed to an evolutionary course of contrastive analysis between English and Chinese sentence patterns. Students in both classes were asked to take a writing test before and after the experiment. Their writing work was graded and sentential mistakes in it were analyzed via SPSS. The results show that though students’writing level in both EC and CC has been boosted, yet the students from EC have made better achievements than those from CC. Therefore, the comparative studies of English and Chinese sentence patterns has been proved to play a positive role in English writing teaching in senior high school.