A Study On The Application Of The Text-Retelling Strategy To Improving Junior School Students’Writing Competence

In China, how to improve students’ English writing skills is very important in English teaching and it has been a major concern for most junior school English teachers. Apart from lacking writing techniques, most Students think lexical, stylistic and syntactical aspects are the most difficult in English writing. This thesis attempts to experiment on text-retelling strategy based on the Krashen’s input hypothesis, Swain’s output hypothesis and schema theory to improve the junior school students’ English writing competence. The purpose of conducting this experiment is to explore the effectiveness of implementing the text retelling strategy in reading class to improve the students’ writing ability.The following hypotheses are proposed:(1) Compared with the traditional teaching way, the text-retelling strategy would help the students improve their interests and confidence in their writing.(2) The text-retelling strategy would improve the junior school students’ writing competence.Reading is very crucial to improve students’ writing. It provides topic-related input language for writing. What is more, guided text-retelling strategy after reading the passages requires the students to output what they have acquired explicitly and fluently. Employed effectively and systematically, retelling not only consolidates comprehension of the contents but also cultivates students’ awareness of writing styles such as diction, grammar, expressions and textures. And this is very helpful for students to develop vocabulary, structures and coherence which play a positive role in improving their writing ability.The subjects in the study were the87students from Class3and Class4, Grade7, No.55Middle School, Tianjin. The experiment lasted for two semesters. The data came from two questionnaires, pre-test and post-test. After applying the strategy regularly and actively, the remarkable difference in the post-test between the experimental class and control class showed that the retelling had a positive effectiveness on their writing. The research showed that the text-retelling strategy could help the students acquire the input language better and improve the junior school students’writing competence.However, compared with the middle and high level students, several bottom level students did not improve their writing obviously. Although the teacher gave them the same guidance and opportunities to practice the strategy, they could not finish the retelling and writing as well as others. In the future, how to improve the bottom level students’writing competence is still a big problem for the teachers.