A Study Of The Effect Of High School English Writing Teaching Based On The Basic Level Category Theory

Writing, as one of the four basic skills in English learning, plays an irreplaceable role in high school English teaching. As the overall ability of utilizing English is emphasized in Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards(2013), writing competence, as the most important part of it, should be taken seriously. However, the present teaching situation is far from optimistic. Improving students' writing ability is always one of the English teachers' difficulties and their research focus.The study is designed to explore English writing teaching in high schools from a new perspective on the basis that the students' English writing skill is lean in terms of content. As we all know, an English composition needs to focus on one topic which is completely reflected in the basic event category. The basic level category has basic cognitive function, the cornerstone through which individuals recognize the world.The basic level is where the largest amount of information about an item can be obtained with the least cognitive effort. The basic level categories stored in individuals' mind contribute to the construction of discourse. Once the basic level of categories is stimulated, students will write more. Thus this research may be used for reference in the teaching of English writing. The research aims to answer two questions: 1) Can high school English writing teaching based on the basic level category improve students' English writing ability ? and 2) Can high school English writing teaching based on the basic level category enrich the content of students' compositions?Subjects in this research are 78 students from two paralleled classes in Guangzhou × × Middle School(One as experimental group, the other as control group) and the whole experiment lasted 12 weeks. Study includes:(1) the pretest: the students from both CG and EG took a test to measure their English performance and their English writing ability before the experiment.(2) the experiment: English writing based on the basic level category theory was applied to the experimental group while the control group was taught in the traditional writing approach.(3) thepost-test: all the students took a test to demonstrate whether high school English writing teaching based on the basic level category theory make any difference in the English writing proficiency from two groups after the teaching experiment. The research results were processed and analyzed by SPSS in order to reach a resolvable conclusion. The results of this research indicated that high schools English writing teaching based on the basic level category can improve students' English writing ability and it contributes to enrich the content of students' compositions as well.Thus, it can be seen that high school English writing teaching based on the basic level category theory is an effective way for teachers to improve their strategies in English teaching writing. However, the results from the research need to be further explored and verified in practice. And this study will be dug further with the development of Cognitive Linguistics in the future days.