A Study On The Frequency Of Reading-to-write Tasks On Senior Students' Textual Borrowing And Writing Achievements

Previous studies about frequency and textual borrowing revealed that frequency has a positive effect on students' textual borrowing.This thesis aims at investigating the frequency of reading-to-write tasks on senior high school students' textual borrowing and their writing achievements.Three research questions are put forward as follows:(1).Does frequency of reading-to-write tasks influence senior high school students' textual borrowing in amount,type and function?(2).Can frequency of reading-to-write tasks improve students' writing achievements?(3).Are there any differences in textual borrowing amount,type and function between high scores students and low scores students?Sixty high school Grade two students participated in this study.The experiment is carried out in regular class time.They are provided with two reading materials about online communication with opposite views.After reading the source texts in set time,students are asked to write an argumentative writing.The same process is repeated in the following two weeks consecutively.Coding of textual borrowing in the present study adopts Shi's study(2004)which includes amount,type and function.Students' writing papers are rated by the scoring standards of College Entrance Examination.All the data is analyzed by Repeated Measures ANOVA of SPSS.Some findings are summarized as follows:Firstly,frequency of reading-to-write task has an active effect on students' borrowed words.As the task increased,students tend to borrow more words from the original materials during the three tasks,which indicating a significant difference between the first time and the second time.For the types of textual borrowing,copy is the most frequently used type,which showing a significant difference through three tasks.With the influence of tasks,students make their efforts to make use of the strategies of modification and transformation.In terms of borrowed functions,most borrowed units are used to as claim and data.As the task increased,the rate of using counterargument and rebuttal is rising.Secondly,frequency of reading-to-write tasks causes an improvement on students' writing achievements.Students' writing achievements is getting improvement both in the language of content and structure of essays.Thirdly,frequency of reading-to-write tasks have different effects on students' textual borrowing performance by high scores students and low scores students.High scores students borrowed moreinformation from the source texts than low scores students.As concerned as borrowed types,the two groups made use of copy frequently through three tasks,and high scores students used more modification and transformation than low cores students.As mentioned as borrowed functions,the two groups both tend to use borrowed units as their data and claim,and counterargument and rebuttal are found in the writing papers of high scores students.This study has some implications.Theoretically,it enriched the study that frequency of tasks can improve students' textual borrowing practices.Pedagogically,repetitive reading-to-write task is suggested to be a teaching method for teachers,and textual borrowing can be a learning strategy of English learners.