| Retelling is an important English learning strategy.The Computer-based English Listening and Speaking Test of Guangzhou High School Entrance Examination includes a part of information retelling which requires students to retell the text by using the information taken down while listening.Based on the understanding of Ziem's description of the Frame elements like “filler”,“slot”,and “default value”,the Frame theory can be applied in the information retelling.The topic knowledge stored in students long term memory is like the filler,and can be chosen to fill to the slots required according to the default value.Once the students have rich frame elements about a topic,they can understand the listening text and retell it quite well.The purpose of this study is to apply the Frame Theory in the retelling teaching,aiming to the answer the following two research questions:(1)Can frame-based topic retelling training improve the participants' understanding of the retelling passage?(2)Can frame-based topic training improve the participants' retelling performance in terms of completeness of the retelling content,accuracy and fluency of the speech?The participants in this study were from two Junior Three in the Affiliated Tianhe School of Guangdong Experimental Middle School.One was randomly assigned to the EC(EC,N = 40)and the other to the control class(CC,N = 40).The experiment lasted for 6 weeks with 14 lessons training students in different topics.Before framed-based topic training,1.5 months were spent to train both groups' retelling micro skills.During the experiment,a common teaching method was used in the CC,in which students were taught by reading words aloud and then using the vocabulary dictation to recall the memory of the words before retelling.And later,after listening to the passage and preparing,students retold the passage.In the EC,teachers showed a topic to guide students to have a brainstorming,and then students wrote down the useful words related to the topic to help them form a mind map for retelling.At last,after listening to the passage,they retold the listening text with the contents needed within 50 seconds.The data collected from and questionnaire surveys before or after the experiment are analyzed.The findings show that:(1)The frame-based topic training can improve the students' understanding of the listening text,for the EC outperformed the CC in the post-test.(2)The frame-based topic training can help students improve the completeness of the retelling content,because it can enrich students' frames,enable students to take more notes,and enhance their ability in catching information needed from the listening text.(3)The frame-based topic training can improve students' accuracy and fluency in retelling.That main factors that caused the improvement might be that students can enrich their frame elements,and they make more logical connection among the elements of the frames and sub-frames in their long term memory as well.These findings show that the frame-based topic teaching has a positive effect on students retelling ability,and it is suggested that in English retelling teaching in the Junior high schools,teachers need to help students form the awareness of frames and sub-frames so as to benefit their retelling ability. |
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