A Study On The Application Of Formulaic Language Recitation To English Writing Teaching In Secondary Vocational School

In all of the second language learners' abilities,writing ability is one of the most difficult to develop.Especially in the secondary vocational school,there is an obvious fact that the efficiency of English writing teaching is not high and the overall level of students' writing is low.Linguistic studies have found that here are semi-fixed structures of lexical and syntactic features in vocabulary and syntax.These structures are called formulaic language.Scholars in and abroad have done many researches about it.But most of the research objects are college student,and few are the students of secondary vocational school.As one of the oldest and most widely used methods in foreign language teaching in China,recitation should play an important role in today's English teaching.So the present study attempts to introduce formulaic language recitation into English writing teaching in secondary vocational schools in order to explore the feasibility of the application of formulaic language recitation in English teaching and to investigate whether formulaic language recitation improves students' writhing skills in the secondary vocational school.First of all,the author explores how to put formulaic language recitation into secondary vocational English writing teaching.In addition,the further teaching experiments are carried out in practice to verify its effectiveness.This study begins with the introduction of formulaic language theory and chunking theory to lay a foundation of the research necessity.During the research,teaching experiment which lasts one semester is conducted among two classes in an secondary vocational school in Xiangtan.In the experimental class teaching,formulaic language is mostly from textbook,supplemented by the teacher in daily teaching and accumulated by students' outside reading.Besides,it is expected that the students could choose formulaic language independently.Meanwhile,the teacher should check the recitation of the students so that they could set up their own database of formulaic language.What's more,there are writing exercises.The students are expected to extract formulaic language and finish the timed writing under the guidance of the teacher.In the control class,the routine teaching model is used and the teacher doesn't give the students any ideas about formulaic language.Writing tests,questionnaires and interviews are carried out in theexperimental class before and after the experiment.The results of the research show that:1)Formulaic language recitation can significantly increase the amount of formulaic language used in the secondary vocational students' English writing.The increase of formulaic language means that the content of the article is richer and more diversified.2)Formulaic language recitation can obviously raise the secondary vocational students' writing ability.The post-test writing scores of experimental class surpass those of pretest of experimental class and post-test of control class a lot,revealing that formulaic language recitation has a positive effect on secondary vocational English writing.The overall writing level in post-test of experimental class is higher,and the language expression is more correct and concise than that of control class.3)Formulaic language recitation can level up the students' interest,self-confidence and their autonomous learning ability in English writing.Compared with pretest period,students' learning strategy of formulaic language recitation acquired in the experimental stage stimulates their desire in learning English writing and their self-confidence in learning English.