The Effect Of Dictogloss In Teaching Writing In Senior High School

In senior high school, when teachers are training students’ comprehensive abilityof using English language, they are required to cultivate students’ writing abilitybecause it is an important aspect which no one should ignore. However, it is obviousthat teaching writing is a weak point in the practical process. In many senior highschools, there are no specific English writing courses. Many English teachers havefew methods of teaching writing. Thus, students’ writing competence can hardly bepromoted.Since the advancement of curriculum reform started, the requirement of teachingEnglish in senior high school has enhanced. According to the New CurriculumStandard, the mission of English course is to further define the purpose of Englishlearning, develop students’ competence of cooperative learning and independent study,fix attention on improving students’ abilities of acquiring information, analyzing andsolving problems, especially focus on promoting students’ ability of thinking andexpressing in English.As one of the language output skills, writing is very important in the stage ofsenior high school. Both teachers’ abilities of teaching writing and students’ abilitiesof writing need to be improved. Based on this hypothesis, the author tries to find ananswer to the following questions to what degree dictogloss promotes writinginteraction between teaching and learning, how dictogloss facilitates students’acquisition of writing abilities as far as grammar and vocabulary are concerned, andwhy dictogloss is practicable for teaching English writing.Dictogloss was first proposed by Ruth Wajnryb in Grammar Dictation, whichwas published in1990. Dictogloss is also named as grammar dictation or dicto-comp.It originates from model-recitation dictation, but it is completely different from themodel-recitation dictation in objectives and procedures. It is a text-based, task-based,and learner-centered teaching procedure which is used to help learners to focus onmeaning and form and facilitate learners to use the target language on a text basis.Dictogloss is a classroom dictation activity in which four steps are involved,preparation, dictation, reconstruction, and analysis and collection.Many domestic and foreign researchers have studied on the practicability ofdictogloss in teaching English. They have proved that dictogloss has a positive effect on teaching and learning. Foreign scholars have done a series of empirical researches,such as Toshiyo Nabei (1996), George Jacobs (2003) and others. The researches doneby domestic scholars, such as Gao Xiaofang (1998), Liang Hongmei (2004) andothers have shown that dictogloss activities can create favorable conditions for secondlanguage acquisition. According to the researches at home and abroad, the purpose ofthis study is to explore whether dictogloss is practicable for teaching English writing,if it is, how it affects students’ abilities of English writing, and whether it could helpstudents reduce grammar mistakes, and facilitate their vocabulary learning. Thisexperiment carried out in No.2Middle School Attached to Qinghai Normal University.Two parallel classes of Senior One were selected as the experimental class and thecontrolled class. Through pretest and posttest of writing, questionnaires, andclassroom observation, data were collected. And then SPSS was used to analyze thedata to find out the effect of dictogloss in teaching English writing in senior highschool.