Action Research On Development Of Senior High School Students' English Summary Writing Skills Under The Reading-to-write Approach

At present,English as one the most important and essential tool to achieve the international communication is also one of required subjects in China's senior high schools.More and more scholars and English teachers do the exploration of how to improve senior high school students' English competence in China and many studies have been also done to search for useful teaching methods on English four basic skill.To a large extent,the two aspects of English reading and writing arouse scholar' attention,and these studies to explore the relation and interaction between reading and writing have widely conducted by many scholars.From these studies,it can show that there is a new English teaching method to combine two language skills reading and writing together,which is the Reading to Write Approach.Different from the other English teaching approach regarding language four basic skills are totally separate,the Reading to Write Approach focuses on the function of reading to writing,and the final goal of the approach is to write.According to the contents of the current National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools in 2017,there are many requirements for English writing,which is regarded as the most difficult part of English learning by the learners.Among these requirements,senior high school students are not only required to express their opinions and narrate something in written forms,but also demands them to write a summary based on a text after reading.It presents the goal of cultivating senior high school students' skills of generalization by the training on thinking and language expression in written forms.Besides,completing a good summary also requires students' to have good understanding and generalizing the content of the reading material.Hence,training students' summary writing is a way and process to develop their integral ability to do reading,summarizing and use English language,which sets a higher standard for all senior high school students in China.In other words,it is a great challenge to senior high school students to meet in a short time.In face of this problem with senior high school students' shortage of summary writing skills,the author of the thesis,also as the researcher and the teacher,decided to do an action research for the purpose of solving the problem in order to develop senior high school students' summary writing skills under the Reading to Write Approach,which was guided by three research questions:(1)Do the participants develop their skills of finding information and generalizing it when guided by the questions in the post reading stage? How does that happen?(2)How do participants improve their summary writing in the aspects of conciseness,completeness,coherence?(3)Why does the process of "questioning-reading-generalizing-constructing-writing" from the Reading to Write Approach have an effect on developing the participants' summary writing skills?The author conducted the process of the “questioning-reading-generalizing-constructing-writing” in an action research under the Reading to Write Approach in the post reading stage.In the action research,the author designed some post-reading questions based on the reading materials with the purpose of guiding students to read and search for key information of each texts,then students generalized the key points by doing some analyses for their answers.Finally,students needed to construct the summary writing by converting the original sentences in the their own words under the guidance of the author.All of process were the preparations for follow-up summary writing.This action research was designed on the theoretical bases of Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Swain's Output Hypothesis,the Reading to Write Approach and Schema Theory,which not only explain the relation between reading and writing and their interaction,but also support the practicality of the teaching design and its effects in this research.This research lasted for almost one semester in one class of Grade One with 53 students in No1 Senior High School in Liupanshui,Guizhou.In this action research,some instruments were used for data collection,including interview,questionnaires and pre-tests and post-tests.The data collected from three times of pre-tests and post-tests were analyzed by the Paired Samples T-test with SPSS 19.0.This research has finally yielded the findings as follows:(1)The participants develop their skills of finding information and generalizing it when guided by the questions in the post reading stage,and participants achieve the goal by reading under the guidance of questions.(2)The ways to improve participants' summary writing in the aspects of conciseness,completeness,coherence are to read under the guidance of questions,convert the long sentences and complex sentences into short and concise ones and apply the sentence structures and transitional words.(3)The whole process included two procedures English reading and writing,which were the essential parts for mastering the skills of generalization.According to the schema theory,the students had their schemata which can be activated under the guidance of questions to comprehend the reading material,through a complex thinking process of turning the specific information to the abstract by generalizing and constructing a summary writing.