Research Into The Improvement Of Junior High School Students Writing Through Simple Sentences Pattern Drills

It is very common that the junior middle school students often write English compositions under the influence of their thinking in their mother tongue, which results in many errors. A lot of junior middle school students write sentences by translating Chinese into English word by word. When writing, students don’t know how to express their ideas in suitable expressions of English. So when faced with the senior high school entrance examination or college entrance examination, a large number of students become nervous and anxious. As English teachers, we are supposed to study the teaching methods of writing in spite of the difficulties.Guided by the scaffolding theory, the author practiced simple sentence-pattern drilling in the teaching of English writing in junior high school. Simple sentence-pattern drilling is aimed at providing students with the “scaffolds” for English writing by means of intensive sentence-pattern drills. The students would construct their language awareness through this kind of intensive drilling. At last they can retrieve the most suitable sentence patterns to express themselves.Through the sentence-pattern drilling, the author tried to find the answers to the following three questions:(1) Can sentence-pattern drilling reduce Chinglish expressions in students’ writing?(2) Can sentence-pattern drilling help increase students’ interest in writing?(3) Can sentence-pattern drilling improve the scores of writing?The author chose two parallel classes of grade eight in No. 9 Middle School of Zhungeer to conduct a teaching experiment for about 4 months. The empirical research is aimed to find out whether the five simple sentence-pattern drilling as scaffolding in English writing can have better effect in helping students to improve their English writing and what attitudes students hold towards this new teaching method.Before the experiment, the students both in the experimental class and the control class were asked to write a composition and their compositions were marked by two experienced teachers from grade nine. Then the author used SPSS17.0 to process the data. The results show that there is no significant difference between the means of the two classes and their writing is at the same level before the experiment.During the 4-month experiment, the students in the experimental class were asked to do a series of simple sentence-pattern drilling. However, in the control class, traditional teaching of English writing is done.After the experiment, students were asked to write a composition with the same requirements as those in the pretest. Their scores would also begiven by the same two experienced teachers from grade nine. In the same way,the author used SPSS17.0 to conduct independent samples T-test. The results show that after the teaching experiment, the difference between the two classes is significant and students in the experimental class have made greater progress, which reveals that simple sentence-pattern drilling has better effect in helping teachers to improve students’ English writing compared with the traditional teaching. In order to find out what attitudes that students hold towards these two teaching methods, a questionnaire was also employed.Compared with traditional teaching method, this new teaching method gained more popularity among students.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is the introduction. In this chapter, the author gives the description of the research background,purpose of the present study and the significance of the present study as well as the structure of the thesis. Chapter Two is the literature review. This chapter gives a brief introduction about the previous researches on pattern drills in language teaching abroad and at home, and the definition of scaffolding. Meanwhile, it contains the definition of scaffolding instruction and a description of the application of scaffolding theory in teaching with simple sentence patterns drilling as measures of scaffolding. Chapter Three is the research methodology which focuses on the application of the sentence-pattern drilling as the scaffolding to English writing in detail.Chapter Four is the results and discussions. The author makes a detailedanalysis on the collected data. Chapter Five is the conclusion. Main finds,limitations and the suggestions of further study are contained in the fifth chapter.