An Empirical Study On Improving Junior High Students' English Writing Ability Through Recitation-Input

As one of the four basic skills for communication and language learning,there is no doubt that writing is a complex cognitive activity and an essential standard to measure students' language ability.As an important aspect of language teaching,writing teaching is also a difficult part in Junior high school English teaching.And,the writing ability of students in junior high school is far beyond satisfaction.Recitation,which is one of the most important ways of students' input,has been a vital method for teaching in the long history of traditional Chinese teaching.And it has been increasingly acknowledged by researchers that recitation is also effective in China,which can help students deepen the understanding of many articles.It surely can strengthen the input for the second language,and thus enhance the students' accumulation of language,producing standardized language output.This thesis,based on Krashen's input hypothesis,Schmidt' noticing hypothesis as well as Bialystok' implicit and explicit knowledge,tries to test the actual efficacy of recitation input in improving junior school students' English writing through carrying out a teaching experiment.And the experiment is designed to answer the following research questions:1.What are the effects of recitation input on students' writing ability?2.What are the effects of recitation input on students' writing confidence?The subjects of the research are 83 junior school students who come from two parallel classes of Grade Eight in a Junior High school.42 are assigned in theexperimental class and 41 students are assigned in the control class.The experiment lasts 14 weeks,recitation input method is adopted in the experimental class and the same teacher adopts the traditional teaching method in the control class.In order to survey the results of the research,two writing tests are held in two classes before and after the teaching experiment.T-test by SPSS is used to analyze the data scientifically.After the post-tests of composition,an interview is taken in the experimental class among six students to know the students' attitudes toward recitation input teaching method.Through the empirical research,it demonstrates that the average score of students in experimental class is obviously higher than that of control class.The contrastive analysis of post-test between two classes reveals that the students in experimental class do well in the actual use of vocabulary spelling,phrase,sentence patterns and grammar.Meanwhile,through interview,it can be seen that most students hold a positive attitude towards recitation input teaching method and they think that the recitation input method is helpful to improve their English writing ability.