A Study Of The Recitation And Imitation Method In English Writing Teaching At Senior High Schools

As an essential part of the examination-oriented education system,the importance of high school English writing is self-evident.The academic circles have been endeavoring to improve students' English writing via a wide variety of test preparation methods.However,the results were not satisfactory.Although many students have mastered considerable vocabulary and a lot of grammar rules,they feel powerless and can do nothing about the frequent appearance of problems such as logical chaos,improper application of words,monotonous sentences,incomplete structures.What's more,improving English writing is a difficult and slow process,as most English teachers are obliged to devote their time and energy to the more urgent teaching programs which leaves a limited time for writing teaching.As a result,writing teaching lags behind other disciplines in the teaching of English,and that is also one of the weaker links in students' learning.This paper aims at helping to change the current situation in writing teaching to help students write a composition which has clear focus,full content,reasonable cohesion and accurate expression in a limited time.Investigation shows that the application of recitation and imitation method to English writing teaching has already been studied by some educators,but the previous researches were mostly conducted in college English writing teaching.In addition,the majority of teachers and students often failed to fully utilize the recitation and imitation method in their teaching practice: they either failed to select the reciting materials properly,or did not combine the recitation method with the imitation method.This paper analyzes the present situation and existing problems of English writing teaching at senior high schools through empirical study.By studying the grading rules of college entrance essay writing and the problems in English writing,this paper analyzes the reasons for the poor performance ofstudents' writing and tries to reform the traditional recitation method to improve students' English achievement under the guidance of the college entrance essay evaluation standard.In this study,the author uses the output-driven,input-enabled hypothesis as the theoretical basis to experiment on the “recitation-imitation” method in improving the English writing level of senior high school students through a three-month teaching experiment.This study focuses on the following three questions to carry out specific research:(1)What are the main problems that the senior high school students encounter in English writing?(2)What are the factors that cause the problems in senior high school English writing?(3)In what aspects does the recitation and imitation method help senior high school students with their English writing?In order to answer these questions,the author selects 108 students from two parallel classes in Songxian First Senior High School Grade 2 as the subjects,and assigns one class as the experimental class and the other one as the control class.The number of students in these two classes is the same.In the whole experiment,the experimental class adopts the recitation and imitation method,while the control class adopts the traditional reciting method.In order to know students' problems in their writings and the causes of these problems,the author interviews students before and after the experiment and asks all the student to do a questionnaire.The achievements of two classes in the entrance examination and the final examination are used as pre-test and post-test,and the collected data are processed with SPSS software.Both the questionnaire and the interview show that the recitation and imitation method has positive effects on students' writing attitude.For example,the writing interest and confidence of experimental class students have been significantly improved.In addition,the result of the tests shows that the average level of writing of the experimental class is also significantly higher than that of the control class: the students in the experimental class aremore diversified in terms of vocabulary and phrases,with less spelling and grammatical errors,more complex grammatical structure and concrete content.Their essays also turn out to be more thorough with reasonable and clear framework.To conclude,this study shows that the proper application of the “recitation-imitation”method in high school English writing teaching can effectively increase students' interest and confidence in English writing and their English writing level can also be improved accordingly.