A Study On The Application Of Dictogloss To English Writing Teaching In High School

The overall ability of using English is emphasized in the high school English curriculum.As a language output skill,writing is quite important in senior high school.Practically,however,it’s difficult to teach writing.And students’ writing proficiency can hardly be improved.As a result,it’s urgent to seek effective methods of teaching writing.Dictogloss,dating from the 1990s,provides some new ideas for foreign language teaching.It is a text-based and learner-centered teaching method that aims to help learners focus on both form and meaning.Based on the previous studies,this research applies dictogloss to English writing teaching in senior high school.A two-month experiment is conducted with two parallel classes of Senior Two in Nanjing,aiming to answer the following questions:1)What effects does dictogloss have on students’ overall English writing?2)How does dictogloss affect the lexical richness of English writing?3)How does dictogloss affect the syntactic complexity of English writing?4)How does dictogloss affect the language accuracy of English writing?The data are collected through pre-test,post-test,questionnaire and interview,and then analyzed by SPSS software.Results show that dictogloss influences students’ overall English writing positively.In terms of the lexical richness,dictogloss can effectively improve lexical variation and sophistication.However,another dimension,lexical density,is not obviously affected.As for the syntactic complexity,dictogloss can significantly increase the length of production unit but it has little influence on clause density.It obviously increases the frequency of complex sentences while decreases the frequency of simple sentences in students’ writing.And there is no clear difference with respect to the compound and complex-compound sentences.Furthermore,dictogloss is effective in improving language accuracy.Finally,some pedagogical implications are summarized.To ensure the quality and efficiency of dictogloss training,the choice of texts is crucial.The text length,difficulty,topic,logical structure and language authenticity should be appropriate to students.Although dictogloss is student-centered,the role of the teacher matters.Before the task,he should explain the procedures,group the students properly and activate background knowledge.During the task,he should supervise and help students.Besides,dictogloss can be extended to extra-curricular exercises.Students can collect interesting and suitable texts to build an online database.Then they work in groups to do dictogloss after class.In this way,students practice writing on a regular basis and learn more through team work.