A Study Of The Effect Of Text-retelling On Junior High School Students’ English Writing Ability

As the most widely used language in all fields of human life,English has been paid more and more attention.In the compulsory education stage,English teaching mainly requires students to master four basic skills: listening,speaking,reading and writing,and English writing can best reflect students’ comprehensive English ability.Therefore,the cultivation and improvement of English writing ability has become an important task in junior high school English teaching.Based on the framework of scaffolding teaching theory,information processing theory and constructivist learning theory,this study applies text-retelling to junior high school English teaching,aiming to explore the effect of text-retelling on junior high school students’ English writing ability.There are three research questions in this study:Firstly,what effects does text-retelling employed in the English teaching have on the students’ writing attitude?Secondly,what effects does text-retelling have on students’ writing grades?Thirdly,if text-retelling has effect on students’ writing grades,on which aspects of English writing does text-retelling have effect?The research subjects of this study are students of two parallel classes in the eighth grade of Junior Experimental Middle School in Pingyao County,Shanxi Province,which are54 in the experimental class and 53 in the control class.Before the beginning of the experiment,the author conducted a pre-questionnaire and a pre-writing test to examine whether there were significant differences in the two classes’ writing ability,and the pre-test result shows the students of the experimental class and control class have the nearly same writing level.Then text-retelling teaching mode was employed in the experimental class,while the traditional English teaching mode was applied in the control class.After three months’ experiment,in order to test the effect of text-retelling on students’ English writing ability,the author conducted post-questionnaire and post-writing test in the two classes,and interviewed six students with different English writing levels in the experimental class.At last,the collected data were collected by Excel and analyzed by SPSS 22.0 software.Although there are some limitations in this study,through the analysis and discussion of the data,the experimental results show that the application of text-retelling to English teaching in junior high school can change students’ writing attitude and improve students’ writing enthusiasm.Most of the students in the experimental class hold a positive attitude towards text-retelling,and hope to continue to use text-retelling in the future English teaching.In addition,under the teaching mode of text-retelling,students’ total writing grades in the experimental class have improved significantly while students’ total writing scores in the control class have also improved to some extent,but the scores have not reached a significant level.Specifically speaking,students in the experimental class get better grades in terms of content,grammar and vocabulary.However,compared with the control class,the grades of grammar in the experimental class do not get obvious improvement as content and vocabulary.