| English writing, as a crucial basic communicative skill, is specially stressed in foreign language teaching and learning, which can reflect, to a large extent, learners’ comprehensive English performance. However, English writing has been a difficult skill to acquire for most of college students and also a comparatively weak point in college English teaching. In recent years,quite a few scholars and classroom English teachers have already realized the seriousness of this problem and have started from different perspectives to investigate the factors affecting English writing teaching and learning in our country, aiming to explore effective methods to promote students’ writing proficiency. Among them, recitation, as one of the traditional language learning methods, has profound theoretical bases and has been widely employed in native and foreign language learning. But, most previous studies only focus on explaining the effects of recitation on English teaching and learning from theoretical level. There lacks relevant empirical studies so far, especially no single empirical study had been done on the effects of instructed recitation on English majors’ writing ability.This research, based on previous studies and Krashen’ Input Theory, Swain’s Output Theory as well as Bialystok’s distinction between explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge, attempts mainly to explore the effectiveness of applying instructed recitation to English majors’ writing practice, for the purpose of enhancing English majors’ writing ability. This research takes 20 freshmen as the research participants from two natural parallel classes in a provincial university.They are randomly divided into a control group and experimental group and taken part in a12-week experiment on instructed recitation. On the basis of ensured normal classes, students in two groups are required to recite the given texts after class, but only students in experimental group receive planned instructions before reciting. The experiment specifically focuses on answering the following three questions:(1) What are the functions of instructed recitation on students’ overall writing proficiency?(2) What are the effects of instructed recitation on students’ specific writing performance? and(3) What attitude do students hold towards recitation and its functions after instructed recitation practice?This research makes use of computer software SPSS 16.0 to analyze the data collected from pretest, post-test, two interviews and reflective diaries. The final results of the experiment indicate that instructed recitation, compared with non-instructed recitation, has better function on improving students’ overall writing proficiency. To be more specific, instructed recitation has greater effects on promoting students’ specific writing performance on content, organization and language use. By instruction, students’ attitude towards recitation and its functions have changeda lot, mainly manifested in that students hold more positive attitude towards recitation and have more confidence and interest in recitation. They even argue that instructed recitation is an effective method used to enhance their English learning. Therefore, teachers should give their students needed instructions before recitation, so as to make recitation a kind of optimal language input. In this way, recitation can display its biggest effects on improving Chinese students’ English learning and their writing ability.This research exhibits preliminary effectiveness of instructed recitation on the development of English majors’ writing ability and provides some important implications and suggestions to English writing teaching and learning. Needless to say, there are still some limitations existing in this research, such as short period of the experiment time, limited number of participants.Therefore, the research is continued to test further the effects of instructed recitation on English writing by enlarging the scale and perfecting the procedure of the research. |
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