An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Recitation On Junior School Students' English Writing Competence

English writing is a complex cognitive activity and an important standard to measure students' language ability.Because of negative transfer of the native language,weakness of English basis and absence of writing skills,English writing is always the difficult part in the elementary English learning.A considerable number of studies abroad focus on the relationship between comprehensible input theory and writing.Also,there are many empirical studies about the effects of different comprehensible language input theories on students' English writing competence in our country;yet specific studies about the effects of recitation on junior school students' English writing competence are rare.So this study aims to figure out the effects of recitation on junior school students' English writing competence.Based on the Krashen's Input Theory,Bialystok's Explicit Knowledge and Implicit Knowledge,and Swain's Output Theory,this study explores the effects of recitation on junior school students'English writing competence and addresses two questions through the research:(1)What are the effects of recitation on the vocabulary and grammar of junior high students' English writing?(2)What are the effects of recitation on junior high students' English writing performance?This study's subjects involved 81 students from two classes of a Junior High School(40 students from Experimental Class,41 from Control Class).Research time was 15 weeks.Experimental Class adopted recitation method,and Control Class adopted traditional teaching of English writing.Pretest and Posttest were used in this study.Data were analyzed by SPSS 18.0.Also the author used interviews after tests in order to know more about the students' attitudes and opinions towards recitation.Major findings of this study are as follows:(1)After the experiment,the uses of vocabulary and grammar in English writing of Experimental Class were significantly improved.All the students from Control Class and Experimental Class have an improvement in vocabulary and grammar after the experiment,but students,vocabulary and grammar in Experiment Class were all better than Control Class.(2)After the experiment,Experimental Class's English writing performance was significantly enhanced.All the students from Control Class and Experimental Class have an improvement in their English writing performance after the experiment,but the students' writing performance of Experiment Class was better than the Control Class students'performance.Also,most students held a positive attitude towards recitation in their interviews.They considered that recitation is helpful to enhance their self-confidence and their English writing competence in English learning.This study has some weaknesses such as small sample and simple data collection technique,etc.Those weaknesses will be remedied in the further research.However,this study still has its theoretical and practical value.It can provide some pedagogical implications for Chinese junior high school English writing:we should maintain the essence of our traditional teaching method and combine it with the new teaching theory of English writing so as to facilitate the development of junior school students' English writing competence.