An Action Research On The Effects Of Model Text Recitation On Senior High School Students' English Writing

English writing is a very important language output skill,which can objectively mirror students' overall linguistic ability.However,for Chinese students,English writing has always been viewed as the toughest part in English learning and their English compositions are usually full of various mistakes.One of the major reasons is that they are lacking in sufficient language input.With the reform of National Matriculation English Test and the high requirements in National English Curriculum Standard(2017)for students' communicative ability,both English researchers and teachers have attached great importance to strengthening students' language input.Under this background,recitation as a traditional learning method is put forward,trying to help students write out accurate and authentic compositions in a non-English environment.Based on Krashen's Input Hypothesis,Swain's Output Hypothesis and Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis,the action research attempts to improve senior high school students' English writing performance by means of model text recitation.The whole action research started from the end of February,2018 to the beginning of June,lasting fifteen weeks.Sixty participants were selected from Class 12,Senior Two at Huaiji No.1 Middle School,Zhaoqing City.There were two rounds in this research with each round made up of four stages: planning,action,observation and reflection.During the action research,the students were required to recite a model text every week from the ten model ones of different topics.Moreover,they would finish a writing task every other week to check and consolidate the recited contents.In addition,different kinds of instruments were used,including three English writing tests with a pretest,a mid-test as well as a post-test,two questionnaires and two group interviews.The research aims to find out answers to the following questions:(1)Can model text recitation arouse senior high school students' interest in English writing?(2)Can model text recitation help senior high school students improve their English writing performance? If so,which aspects of their English writing can beimproved?After the research,both the quantitative data and qualitative data of the three English writing tests,two questionnaires as well as two group interviews were collected and analyzed.The results show that model text recitation can arouse students' interest in English writing and is also helpful to their English writing performance in terms of content,language use and text structure.Therefore,the traditional learning method recitation is still practicable and effective in English teaching and learning,and it shouldn't be neglected by language learners or replaced by other teaching approaches.