An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Text Retelling On Senior High School English Wirting

English writing is an important form of language output. Acquiring certainamount of writing skills and improving writing skills are not only the requirements ofthe times, but also in line with the new standard of English curriculum. On one hand,social development has caused increasing international exchanges, which in turn giveshigher demand in writing for English learners. On the other hand, every year inCollege Entrance Examination English writing has been occupying a pivotal position.Therefore, teaching writing should go through the whole process of teaching English.However, English writing teaching in senior high school in our country are notsatisfying. In daily teaching, I found that many students fear writing. In the students’writing papers, there existed many language using errors, such as word-spelling errors,wrong tense, no capitalized letter at the beginning of a sentence, agreement errors etc.Students with poor writing skills don’t dare to write, or don’t know how to write.In recent years, scholars have made a lot of studies from different angles. As aresult, they have obtained great achievement on how to effectively improve students’writing ability. But too limited studies have ever been done on writing strategies ofmiddle school students.As was mentioned above, our educators urgently need to explore effectivelearning strategies to improve students’ writing skills steadily.The author believes that text retelling is an effective strategy to improve thestudents’writing skill. It makes students achieve a deeper understanding of the article,absorb and internalize language materials. As a result, the students can createtext-based material, which is an innovation and development based on understanding.The combination of retelling texts and the writing training has far-reachingsignificance. It plays a very important role in English teaching in senior high school.However, in the actual teaching I also found that some students or even the teachersignored the retelling. Some students usually simply regard it as a mechanicalrecitation, and some students are afraid to retell, not willing to try what they think adifficult task. Obviously, it’s not consistent with the syllables which advocates the cultivation of students’ innovative spirit. These phenomena are worth pondering andresearching.In previous studies on the retelling strategy, scholars have done extensiveresearch on the effects oral retelling plays on improving learners’ spoken English.Some scholars have done empirical research on how retelling strategy affectsvocabulary learning. But the empirical research on the impact of retelling strategy onwriting is relatively very rare.The theoretical bases of this study are Atkinson-Shiffrin’s information processingtheory, Flower-Hayer’s cognitive process theory, and constructivist learning theory.The author offered a systematic training for high school students on retelling strategy.It aimed to explore the effect text retelling has on improving students’ English writingability.In the whole period of the experiment, three tests, two questionnaires and aninterview were employed. Firstly I organized a questionnaire survey and a writinglevel test for students. The aim of the questionnaire was to know about the students’emotional attitude towards retelling and writing.In addition, I want to see whetherthere was significant difference in writing competence between the experimental classand the control class.The result of the questionnaire showed that most students had apositive attitude toward retelling.They liked fictional retelling materials and preferredrole-play retelling method.The results of the achievements of the control andexperimental classes indicated that the two classes showed no significant difference inwriting competence.Secondly, I also organized a questionnaire survey for Englishteachers. Thirdly, the subjects in the experimental class took part in the training onretelling strategies. In the control class, retelling strategy training were not applied.They did some extra grammar exercises and reading comprehensive practice. Thetraining lasted four months, during which I organized the mid-test and the post-test.After the post-test, I had an interview with some students. Finally, all the data werecollected and then were given either quantitative or qualitative analysis.The experimental results indicate that students in the experimental class havemade greater progress in writing than those in the control class. It proves that the training of text retelling is effective to raise the level of English writing. Thecombination of retelling and writing in daily teaching can help students get solidlanguage skills and improve their writing competence. It’s worth doing further study.In this study, there are also inadequacies, such as sample selection, the use ofmeasurement tools remain to be further explored and perfected.