Language Chunk Recitation And Input: An Empirical Study On The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior High School

Recitation is always emphasized in the traditional Chinese language teaching in our country. Although this pedagogy is also widely applied in the primary school and middle school English teaching practice, there is not sufficient research about recitation on the theoretical level. The motivation and purpose of this study is to find out the theoretical foundation of recitation, the function of recitation in English learning, how to combine recitation with other contemporary linguistic theories, such as the theories of language chunk, to enable this Chinese traditional pedagogy more scientific and effective in the English teaching and learning.Language chunks seem to be a new conception for many English learners. However, they are just those that learners meet frequently in their learning process:phrases, sentence patterns, words'fixed collocations and other fixed or semi-fixed idioms or expressions all belong to the category of "language chunks". Through the method of reciting sufficient language chunks, to increase the teaching efficiency of English writing in senior high school is the main content of the thesis. The thesis covers six chapters: Chapter one introduces the research background and previous study on the relating field; Chapter two discusses the definition of recitation, previous research fruits about recitation-home and abroad, the relationship between recitation and comprehensible input, the relationship between recitation and optimal input, the definition of language chunk, the importance of language chunk, dual nature of language (rule based and memory based), and the reason for emphasizing the memory based nature of language; Chapter three proposes the research questions, subjects, and the research methodology-both quantitative (three writing tests and questionnaire)and qualitative (interview). In addition, in this chapter, the teaching model of chunk recitation input is also presented; Chapter four analyzes the collected data through SPSS 13.0 statistical software and explores the three research questions of the thesis:1) relevance between reading and English writing performance,2) relevance between traditional recitation and English writing performance, 3) relevance between chunk recitation and English writing performance; Chapter five concludes the main finding of the study, implications and limitations of the study and the suggestions for the further research.The teaching practice of this study lasted four months. The research results show that most students hold positive attitude toward chunk recitation; language chunk recitation input can improve the students'writing ability more obviously compared with the reading input and traditional recitation input; chunk recitation can reduce the negative transfer in English learning. This study has considerable significance on the English writing teaching of senior high school and further exploration of the combination of the traditional recitation with other modern linguistic theories.