A Study Of Avoidance In English Writing In Senior High School

English writing is one of the core contents of our foreign language teaching.Compared with other English skills,students' English writing is a weakness.In the English compositions of students in senior high school,there are repeated simple-vocabularies-and-sentences,single textual cohesion,and old topics,which show that students' writing ability is inferior to what the curriculum criterion sets.Besides English competence,the cause for this phenomenon is related to students' intentional and arbitrary avoidance.In other words,students are willing to choose relatively simple and familiar words to avoid knowledge difficulties.Therefore,this thesis aims at exploring the avoidance phenomenon among 119 students who are from the regular classes of a senior high school.Through text analysis,questionnaires,and interviews,following three issues are discussed:(1)What is the general situation of the avoidance in students' English writing?(2)what do students avoid in English writing?(3)What are the reasons for the avoidance in English writing?Based on results and analysis of the research,the avoidance phenomena in students' English writings is manifested in topics,words and syntax.In general,avoidance of words is the most frequent one among the three types.While students forget the word or feel that they will fail to successfully use the word,they choose to avoid the accurate word and use its superordinate words,synonyms,definitions or circuitous statements instead.Syntactic avoidance goes second.It refers to the use of sentences that are simple and less error-prone with a purpose of avoiding complex language structures.The main tendency of students' syntactic avoidance is to use simple and repeated sentences,active voice,and to avoid inverted sentences.Compared with words and syntax,topic avoidance is not obvious.It mostly appears in the condition that students don't know what words or sentences to use.In addition,it is found that the avoidance method which is most commonly used by students is paraphrase,followed by repetition and reduction.And,the consideration about correctness and the fear of difficulties is the main reason that students often use avoidance in their Englishwritings.Thus,by analyzing the performance and thinking process of students' avoidance,the author proposes that the avoidance behavior in English writing is affected by factors such as emotion,language ability and external objective.Affective factors include students' learning motivation,self-confidence and anxiety.Language ability factor refers to the language knowledge students have equipped with,especially the mastery and application of words and grammar.The external objective factors include teaching mode and evaluation standards.Finally,according to the research findings,this thesis further explores the better measures to deal with the avoidance phenomenon in students' English writings in senior high school.In accordance with text analysis,questionnaires and interviews,based on the analysis of avoidance in students' English writings,this thesis tries to find the reasons for avoidance,contributing to the teaching method of English writing in senior high school.