An Exploratory Case Study Of Imitation Writing

Writing occupies a very important position in foreign language learning. Writing performance can indicate learners' comprehensive language proficiency. However, writing has always been a huge challenge for most Chinese students when they learn English. It is easy to find in their compositions various writing problems, problems like lexical, grammatical, syntactical errors and unidiomatic expressions (Chinglish) caused by the interference of their mother tongue. These errors not only hinder the students' improvement in their writing but also dampen their enthusiasm. Although some teachers tried to take some measures to solve these problems, the result has so far not been as successful as expected.Based on the situation mentioned above, the author of this paper, by conducting a case study of a middle school student, explored the usefulness of imitation writing in helping a Chinese learner improve his English writing. It has been argued for a long time as to whether imitation writing is an effective way for the improvement of students' writing ever since imitation was studied in linguistics. Some researchers embrace this teaching method while others hold negative attitude towards it. Different from the previous studies made on imitation writing, the author of this paper examines the problem from a cognitive perspective by using memetics as the theoretical basis for imitation and lexical chunks and noticing as the theoretical framework for imitation writing. The data and discussion show that imitation writing can help the student accumulate lexical chunks, acquire grammatical knowledge and reduce the negative transfer of the first language. The number of writing problems in the student's compositions has been shown on decline. Therefore, it might be concluded that imitation writing is helpful for the improvement of L2 learners' writing performance and might be used in the teaching of English writing.