A Study Of The Efficacy Of Recitation For The Development Of High School Students' English Writing

It is commonly accepted that writing is the weak point in the four English skills' development in the English teaching. Set in such situation, a lot of teachers are paying much attention to the writing topic, hoping to find a way to improve students' writing ability. In the West, foreign language teaching focuses much attention on relationship between language input and writing. Although there are many studies on recitation input developing the students' writing ability in our country, writing drills are easily ignored, which results in students' inefficiency in writing. How to change the situation in writing teaching is one of the main problems we English teachers have to encounter in high schools. Based on second language acquisition theories, the paper examines the actual efficacy of recitation input in the development of high school students' English writing through vocabulary tests, pre-tests of composition, post-tests of composition, recitation tests, recitation reports, and the study of correlation coefficient between the performance of the experimental group's recitation test and that of its post-writing. The study reveals that recitation input is obviously helpful for high school students to acquire and reinforce the vocabulary and formulaic chunks that are needed in their writing output; it can further improve students' overall writing proficiency; the performance of the recitation tests for the experimental group is significantly correlated to that of post-test writing.Firstly, the paper analyzes the situation of English writing teaching in high schools in China. Writing is neither much valued nor taught in an appropriate method in high schools. As a result, there exist many problems in small vocabulary and lack of variety in sentence pattern and so on in the students' writing. With consideration of these problems and of the demand of English writing in the New English Curriculum for Chinese Senior Middle Schools as well as current research results on this topic, we suggest that it is necessary to integrate writing practices with recitation. In the following part of it, the author demonstrates the basic theories of reciting and writing and reviews the results of the studies on the relationship of recitation and writing. In order to verify the effect of this approach, the author carries out an experiment in two classes in Fuyang senior high school in Anhui Province. In the experiment the students in the experimental class are requested to recite some articles. By analyzing the results of the experiment, the author found that the performances of the writing in the experimental class were significantly better than those students in the Controlled Class. It means that recitation input can improve the ability of English writing in senior high schools.The study provides important implication for the teaching of English writing in senior schools, i.e., while we explore teaching theories and methods of English writing at present, we should positively maintain the very essence of our traditional teaching methods and make full use of the recitation input in the teaching of English writing in an effort to facilitate the development of high school students' English writing.