An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Dictogloss In Improving Junior High School Students’ English Writing Achievements

As a language output skill,writing plays an important role in junior high school English teaching.Therefore,how to improve students’ English writing ability has become a hot issue that researchers and teachers have been exploring.Dictogloss,emerged in the 1990 s,provides new ideas for foreign language teaching.This method is different from the traditional dictation method,in that it is based on the text,taking the needs of students as the goal,and meaning negotiation between students as the means.Based on the theories of cooperative learning and meaning negotiation,this study aims to testify the effectiveness of dictogloss on the English writing achievements of junior high school students,and then further explore the effectiveness of dictogloss on pre-writing planning,while-writing text output and post-writing revision of their writing process.A four-month teaching experiment was conducted in the No.45 middle school in Lanzhou.Two parallel classes in Grade eight were chosen and randomly assigned as experimental class and control class.The former applied the dictogloss to writing teaching through the process of “preparation,dictation,reconstruction,analysis and correction”;and the latter applied the product-oriented approach to writing teaching through the process of “familiarization,controlled writing,guided writing,and free writing”.The experiment process includes pre-test,teaching process,post-test and questionnaire.Two writing tests and questionnaires on writing process were employed as research instruments to collect data.And the data analysis was carried out by SPSS 20.0.The findings are yielded as follows: firstly,comparing the writing achievements of EC and CC in pretest and post-test,writing achievements in EC is significantly higher than that of CC,which indicates that dictogloss can significantly improve junior high school students’ English writing achievements.Secondly,comparing the questionnaire scores of EC and CC in pretest and post-test,it is found that the dictogloss has no significant effect on pre-writing planning,but has significant effects on the while-writing text output and post-writing revision.Finally,the study suggests that good meaning negotiation between students can greatly influence students’ reconstruction of the text.Therefore,teachers should coordinate the relationship among students in the group and allocate tasks to them reasonably in order to better promote the implementation of dictogloss.