A Study On The Effects Comparison Between Model-Imitation Practice And Sentence-Drilling Practice

Writing has long been emphasized as one of the core language skills in language teaching; however, writing teaching at college level has also long been recognized as time-consuming but slowly effect-taking, and sometimes even affectless. Therefore, writing teaching has not received due attention. The teaching reality with the higher vocational colleges was even worse, with the writing instruction ignored by teachers themselves or mismatched with the actual demands of the students. The right writing teaching method is, therefore, in great need for the higher vocational colleges.Model-imitation method is one of the most prevailing one in kinds of English training organizations, which has been accepted by most of the trainees who are mainly from colleges or universities. It has not been testified as effective for the vocational students as it for those students of higher level. Due to this fact, the present experiment is going to check its effect with the participants from higher vocational colleges.Sentence-based writing teaching rose from syntax-oriented method in the 1970s abroad but its prime time was short. It has also become briefly popular mainly in the 1980s in China, which now is seldom mentioned among other new pedagogies. It emphasized that the sentence was a central component of what students were asked to study, practice, and become conversant with. As is known, sentence is also the very basic component of any writing and based on the fact with the vocational students'writing ability that they are extremely weak in constructing well-formed sentences, the writer tries to introduce in the sentence-drilling approach here to find out whether it is more suited for the vocational students.In order to test and compare the effects of the two different teaching methods mentioned above, an experiment was carried out to find the answer. 36 students fell into two groups were given two different treatments: the instruction of model-imitation practice for Group One and the instruction of sentence-drilling practice for group two within 8 weeks. The scores were analyzed by SPSS and it showed that both practice were effective but there was no significant difference between them in the present study.The result of the experiment is not able to be generalized due to the unavoidable limitations of the experiment, but hopefully it may shed some light on the writing teaching in higher vocational colleges and it is supposed to offer some implications for the future similar research.