Influence Of Categorization On Writing Capability In Wording And Phrasing Of Senior High School Students

It is indispensable for people to possess English communicative capability in modern society.Writing,as a necessary component of English communicative capability,is a crucial embodiment of the learners' comprehensive language competence.It makes an essential part of English teaching,and school education at different levels all lays great emphasis on the development and improvement of students' writing skills.However,in the realistic English teaching,there still exist many problems in writing teaching and learning and students' writing condition is not so optimistic.Writing is a thinking process,whose study not only stays in linguistic level or pursues for change of methodology,but may also involve the probe into the cognitive mechanism of language formation.Meanwhile,writing is a knowledge output,a process of manifesting cognitive category by language systematically,and is therefore closely related to categorization.The present empirical study explores influences of categorization,under the guidance of prototype category theory,on English writing from the perspective of writing capability in wording and phrasing,which is crystallized into three aspects.Accordingly,three research questions are put forward as follows:1)What is the influence of categorization on accuracy in lexis in English writing of senior high school students?2)What is the influence of categorization on flexibility in phrase in English writing of senior high school students?3)What is the influence of categorization on grammaticality in syntax in English writing of senior high school students?The present study is conducted to 100 senior high school students of two natural classes in Grade Two in Jiangning Senior senior high school of Nanjing.One class is randomly chosen as the experimental class and the other one is the controlled class.The writing teaching methodology based on prototype category theory is applied in the experimental class while the traditional method is taught in the controlled class.In the lasting 18-week contrast experiment,two questionnaires and English proficiency tests as well as three writing mid-tests are implemented whose data are analyzed by Excel 2010 and SPSS 18.0 to get experimental results.It can be concluded that,after analyzing the research data,the writing teaching methodology based on prototype category theory is more efficient than the traditional teaching methodology inwording&phrasing of English writing.Categorization can improve senior high school students' writing capability in wording&phrasing under the guidance of the prototype category theory.From the perspective of mean score of experiment,on the whole,the three aspects reveal continually ascending trends,but speed is different.To be specific,1)For accuracy in lexis of writing,the speed appears slow first,fast afterwards and slow again finally,like a S-curve.The influence of categorization is not obvious at the beginning of the experiment,but it becomes significant right after a period of experiment and keeps rising steadily.2)For flexibility in phrase of writing,it is just the opposite.The speed is fast first and slow afterwards.The influence is pretty obvious soon after the experiment is conducted,and maintains the momentum of steady growth and runs ahead of the other two aspects all the way.3)For grammaticality in syntax of writing,the speed shows steady but less significant growth from the beginning to the end.The benefit of categorization is therefore relatively less,and future trend of the influence is hard to predict when knowledge of syntactic grammaticality becomes more and more difficult and complex.Students apply the prototype category theory in writing learning,exerting a subtle influence on other fields of their English learning,which has some pedagogical implications for practical English writing teaching in senior high school.The influence of categorization on writing is not supposed to be ignored,but to be applied in specific writing activities.Application of prototype category theory had better run through the whole writing process in which teacher should train emphatically students' prototype category awareness and help students enhance their writing capability and interest by categorization under the guidance of the prototype category theory.