An Empirical Study On The Accuracy Improvement Of English Writing Under The Instruction Of Prototype Theory

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four basic skills of language learning,among which writing is the last one to acquire and more difficult to acquire than the other three skills. New Curriculum Standards for English Teaching at Senior High School(2011)emphasizes that Senior High School students’ writing must comply with Level-7 standard.However, current teaching condition of English writing and its results are far from satisfactory. These unsatisfactory issues are high error rate of singular and plural,grammatical mistakes and frequent use of finite verbs and verb phrases in a simple sentence.Besides, it is also monotonous to use repetitious linking phrases, such as “because, and, so”in the writing of most Senior High School students. This study, based on the Prototype Theory, proposes to improve the accuracy of expression in English writing by using proofreading and error correction. In order to verify its effectiveness, the author makes a teaching experiment for a semester. The subjects of the research are students from two classes of Grade One, Anhui Bengbu Railway School, Class 13 as the experimental class and Class 11 as the controlled class. Proofreading and error correction is applied in the experimental class, while traditional teaching method in the controlled class. The author analyses the result by SPSS19.0. The research results show that: after the error correction experiment, there is significant difference between the two classes both on error numbers(P=0.044<0.05)and writing scores(P=0.041<0.05). By comparison, the hypothesis that proofreading and error correction can significantly improve the accuracy of expression in English writing is proved.