A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Text Recitation And Text Retelling On Vocational College English Writing

The efficiency of vocational college English writing teaching is relatively low inEnglish teaching. At the same time, learning how to write effectively is also thedifficult and important skill for most vocational college learners. There are manyteaching methods on improving students’ English writing competence, which are putinto teaching practice and have gotten some positive effects on students’ Englishwriting competence. Meanwhile, the traditional recitation input and retelling strategycome back to the researchers’ researches. At present, some empirical studies onrecitation or retelling have testified that both recitation and retelling are able toimprove students’ English comprehensive ability in many relative researches.However, there are few comparative studies to test the effects of the two strategies onimproving students’ English writing competence. Therefore, the author adopts textrecitation and text retelling to vocational college English class respectively tocompare the effects of the two strategies on improving students’ English writingcompetence and tries to explore a more effective way to writing teaching and writinglearning.Based on the comprehensible input of Krashen’s language input hypothesis, theimportance of practice in Swain’s language output, and the zone of proximaldevelopment of constructivism, this study attempts to compare the effects of textrecitation and text retelling on vocational college English writing and tries to answerthe following three questions:1) What is vocational college learners’ attitude towardstext recitation and text retelling and how about their present writing situation?2) Isthere any significant difference of learners’ English writing competence in the twoclasses after the experiment? And in what aspects do they have differences?3) Whichstrategy has more effects on the improvement of learners’integral writing competence,text recitation or text retelling?This study adopts comparative study method.80participants were chosen totake part in this research and they are sophomores majoring in BusinessAdministration from Shandong Radio and Television University. They are divided into two groups. One is text recitation class (Experimental Class One) and the other istext retelling class (Experimental Class Two). In the whole process of the experiment,the pre-questionnaires and pre-writing tests are carried out at first. Then the studentsfrom the text recitation class and text retelling class are trained by different strategies.At the end of the experiment, the post-questionnaires and post-writing tests areimplemented in the two classes. Finally, the percentage of each option for allquestions in the questionnaires is input into Excel forms. All the test scores collectedfrom the experiment are input into SPSS17.0to analyze the statistic data.The study draws the following conclusions from the analysis.1) Most studentsthink that both text recitation and text retelling play important roles in their Englishwriting by pre-questionnaires. They also realize that English writing is important. Atthe same time, it is one of the most difficult skills for them.2) Text recitation class hasmade progress in vocabulary, grammar and language fluency. There is no significantdifference in their language organization. However, text retelling class has madeprogress in the four aspects. In addition, the post-questionnaires’ statistical results areroughly consistent with the test statistical results.3) The two strategies have almostthe same effects on the improvement of their integral writing level by paired samplestest of post-tests.This research has instructive significance for vocational English writingteaching. Teachers should put more emphasis on English writing teaching. At thesame time, they should make proper learning strategies for students according to theirinterest, abilities and requirements of learning tasks, which can improve their Englishwriting ability.However, because of the small size of samples, short period of experiment time,limitations of choosing materials, measuring tools and so on, future researches need tobe further studied, explored and improved in these aspects.