Text Analysis Approach To The Teaching Of Summary Writing In Senior High School

As part of the comprehensive reform of the College Entrance Examinations of Shanghai in 2017,summary writing has been added as a new English test item.Summary writing tests students’ ability to read,comprehend,judge,generalize,express,and think logically.It combines the two language skills of reading and writing and requires students to be proficient in both,which is a typical test item of positive transfer of input and output.Front-line teachers and researchers have found many problems in the actual teaching process such as students’ confusion of text types,inaccurate of language and lack of richness in vocabulary use.In order to solve these problems found in the teaching process,scholars began to apply different teaching methods to the teaching of summary writing,such as Scaffolding Instruction,genre-based teaching method,“U-shaped-three-step method” and “constructivism-based teaching model” to improve students’ ability of summary writing.Text knowledge is one of the five aspects of language knowledge according to General Senior High School Curriculum Standards for English(2017 Edition,revised in 2020).Text,as a language unit to express meaning,is closely related to the teaching of summary writing.The micro structures of a text include the grammatical structures of sentences,information structures within a sentence,collocations and references,and,while the macro structures encompass text types,the relationship between paragraphs,the relationship between each part of the text and the textual theme.Therefore,if teachers can impart the skill of summary writing based on text analysis,they can aid students in developing text awareness,understanding textual structure,and enhancing their language proficiency.This thesis aims to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of teaching English summary writing in senior high school based on text analysis.To be more specific,this thesis mainly focuses on three research questions:(a)What are the differences in the teaching of reading and writing before and after the change of writing test items in the College Entrance Examination of Shanghai?(b)What is the impact of text analysis teaching method on students’ current learning situation of English summary writing?(cognition,interest,motivation,desire,and skill?)(c)In what aspect does text analysis method improve students’ summary writing performance?(vocabulary,grammar,coherence and cohesion?)To answer these questions,both qualitative and quantitative research instruments are adopted including students’ questionnaire,teachers’ interview and test.After the two-month teaching experiment,major findings of this research are:(a)The main differences are teaching materials,teachers’ awareness and students’ application based on teachers’ interview.(b)There are positive impacts on students’ reading skill and writing skill according to students’ questionnaire.(c)The results of test show that students’ summary writing performance has been improved in cohesion,language score,content score and total score.Furthermore,this thesis tries to provide certain theoretical and practical enlightenments for teachers to help students master summary writing strategies and methods,and further enhance students’ comprehensive language skills.