Impacts Of Text-retelling Training On Junior High School Students' English Writing

English writing skill is the one of essential skills for English learners. At the same time, it is one of the difficult tasks in current junior middle school English teaching. With the purpose of improving learners' writing performance, scholars and teachers have made a large number of studies on writing. Retelling,which is regarded as an efficient way to improve learner's writing, has drawn a great attention in academia and got good result. However, is the retelling training really applicable to all students in anywhere?Guided by Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Information Processing Theory and Swain's Output Hypothesis, this thesis aimed at testing whether text-retelling can improve students' writing achievement,and which aspects were improved significantly on content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics. To testify the effectiveness of the text-retelling training in improving students' writing ability,the empirical research was conducted for about two months from October to November in Hezuo No.2Middle School in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and took 94 students in Grade 8 as research subjects who were from two parallel classes. Class 10 of 46 students was selected to be experimental class,and Class 9 of 48 students was controlled class(CC). The purpose of doing this is to answer the following three research questions: First, can text-retelling training help to improve junior high school students' English writing achievements in Tibetan region? Second, what effects does text-retelling training have on content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics of students' compositions respectively?Third, what attitudes do students have towards the text-retelling training?In the process of experiment, the text-retelling training was employed to students in EC, while the students in CC were taught by using the routine English teaching. The researcher first gave students of both EC and CC a writing test before experiment in order to testify if there existed any differences in the writing level. The results showed that students of two classes were the same writing level. Then, students in EC were required to retell texts after learning each unit, which includes oral retelling and written retelling. Meanwhile, it supplemented with certain related writing practices. The students in CC didn't receive the text-retelling training but other things were all same as in EC. After two months, a post test was conducted in two classes to find out whether learners' writing ability have made some progress by text-retelling training. What's more, a questionnaire survey conducted in EC at the end of this research to investigate their attitudes towards text-retelling training. Finally, the researcher input the data into thecomputer using SPSS 17.0 software for detailed statistical analysis, and drew the conclusion at last.The experimental results showed that the mean score of students' writing in EC compared with CC has significant increased, especially in organization, vocabulary and language use. Although the mean score in CC has increased too, it is not significant. Therefore, this experiment can effectively prove that the text-retelling training is effective to improve junior middle school students' English writing ability in Tibetan region. Thus it is worthy of doing such a research by combining the text-retelling in the daily teaching with writing teaching, especially in those schools where didn't set up the special writing course.Finally, this thesis summarized the major findings of research, the limitations which includes the inexperience of the researcher, limited experimental time, and relatively small experimental samples. And then, the researcher puts forward some pedagogical implications and some suggestions for further study.