A Study On The Effects Of Retelling And Recitation On Junior Middle School Students’ English Writing

In the actual teaching of English writing,the author found some problems.In the teaching of English writing,many teachers have no idea how to improve students’writing ability effectively.Usually,after students have finished writing,the teacher marks students for their compositions,correcting mistakes will be the end.Thus,it is difficult to improve students’ writing ability fundamentally.As we all know,recitation is a kind of learning method to improve English writing,but many students recite model essays blindly after writing a composition,without analyzing model essays.Whether this method is effective is worth pondering.Although reciting is a common and traditional way of learning English,is it effective to recite simply?Is there an easier and more efficient way to do this?Is retelling texts an efficient alternative to reciting texts?This study is based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Swan’s Output Hypothesis,Information Processing Theory and Flower and Hayes’s Cognitive Process Theory.This paper attempts to compare the effects of reciting and retelling texts on junior middle school students in order to find a more suitable way to improve their writing level.The research questions of this study are as follows:1.Which strategy is more effective on the improvement of learners’ diversity of sentence patterns,text recitation or text retelling?Why?2.Which strategy is more effective on the improvement of learners’ vocabulary,text recitation or text retelling?Why?3.Which strategy is more effective on the improvement of learners’ syntactic correctness,text recitation or text retelling?Why?In this study,60 junior middle school students were chosen as the research subjects.The overall level of the 60 students are the same in writing ability(in terms of syntactic diversity,vocabulary and syntactic correctness).Thirty students are subjects in retelling group,and the other thirty are in recitation group.During the experiment,students in the retelling group retold texts,and the ones in reciting group recited texts.Through three rounds of retelling and recitation,the two groups were compared in different aspects of writing.The research steps are divided into three stages:The preparation stage before the experiment,the development and implementation stage.The last is the data analysis and statistics after the experiment.All the statistics in the study were calculated by SPSS 26.0.In order to analyze the reasons,an interview was held after the post-test.The study draws the following conclusions from its analysis:1.The effect of retelling was better than recitation in syntactic diversity.Retelling strengthens students’ ability of reorganizing language,and it improves their memory and thinking.When retelling,students are given more opportunities to practice "output".In the retelling process,in order to conform to the meaning of texts,instead of recalling the original expression,students will use a variety of sentence patterns to reorganize as much as possible.Therefore,their ability to vary sentence patterns was improved.2.Recitation was better than retelling in vocabulary.The reason is that the input of recitation is larger than that of retelling group.In addition,the topic of passages recited in the experiment are similar to the writing topic in post-test.So it is easier for the reciting group to transfer knowledge,thus they showed more vocabularies in the post-test.In contrast,in the retelling group,if retellers can not remember new words,they will try to use learned words to achieve the same meaning,which can not effectively expand students’ vocabulary.3.In the aspect of syntactic correctness,recitation is slightly better than retelling.The reason for this is that in the recitation group,language input was more than that in the retelling group.Besides that,difference in effort of the two groups affected language absorption.The recitation group had more effort and therefore absorbed more.In the recitation group,students paid more attention to the correct expression and thought more about the use of grammar,so there were fewer grammar mistakes.However,most retellers just expressed texts in a different way,but did not pay attention to their wrong expression.Therefore,there was no significant improvement in syntactic correctness in the retelling group.This study is of significance to English writing teaching in junior middle schools.Retelling can help students improve diversity of sentence patterns and language reorganization.Therefore,when students’ sentence patterns are single,they can retell more texts.Recitation helps input a lot of language,transfer knowledge in similar context,and helps students pay attention to the correct use of grammar.Therefore,if students has few vocabularies,can’t use words in proper context or use more grammatical mistakes in composition,they can be encouraged to recite texts.What’s more,teachers should pay more attention to teaching English writing.At the same time,according to students’ interests,abilities and learning tasks,we should make appropriate learning strategies to improve students’ English writing ability.However,further research,exploration and improvement are needed due to the problems of small sample size,short experimental time,limitation of material selection,and measurement tools.