The Unlearning Of Null Arguments Under Instruction With Dictogloss In The English Writing By Senior High School Students

The students’ English writing proficiency is commonly pretty low. Many produce sentences without a subject and/or an object and, even worse, they fail to realize the importance of a subject and/or an object to an English sentence. The subject or object of a verb is generally called an “argument”. And the phenomenon that the arguments do not have phonetic representation but have grammatical functions and semantic contents is called “null arguments”(NA). The thesis holds that Chinese “allowing null arguments”([+NA]) parameter accounts for the students’ drop of subjects or objects.Thereby, this thesis intends to reset the parameters in students’ brains by writing instruction with dictogloss tasks, in which process students may unlearn the Chinese [+NA] parameter in their English writing and acquire English “not allowing null arguments”([-NA]) parameter. This process is called the unlearning of null arguments. Dictogloss is a student-centered teaching technique, which aims to help the students learn, use and master the target language based on the discourse given by writing imitatively based on listening. Generally, a dictogloss class covers four phases: preparation, dictation, reconstruction, and analysis and correction.Thereout, two questions are raised in the present study: 1) How does dictogloss affect the students’ unlearning of NA? And 2) is dictogloss feasible for high school’s classroom English writing instruction? To address the questions above, the author carried out a research, which lasted for one month, in a parallel class of 45 students in a key high school in Sichuan Province with the cooperation of the English teacher of class. The author analyzed comprehensively students’ unlearning of NA, and the changes dictogloss brought on English writing, etc. via writing tests(figuring up their use of subjects and objects), questionnaires and interviews, and consequently got the following findings:1) There exists a significant increase in the usage rates of arguments via dictogloss, which suggests that the parameters of English arguments are reset in students’ brains and hence they unlearn the Chinese [+NA] parameters in their English writing and acquire the English [- NA] parameter. However, when analyzing respectively the data of subjects and objects, the study illustrates that there exists significant differences in the usage rates of subjects but not in those of objects.2) Dictogloss is feasible in future English class. Dictogloss classes make students’ attitude towards writing change to some degree. The causes for such change may lie in that the feeling of involvement and confidence and clearer self-cognition they get in dictogloss classes. Besides, dictogloss improves students writing performance from a vocabulary-sentence-text aspect. First, dictogloss helps enlarge the vocabulary of the students. Second, students do better in the sentential grammatical correctness. And last, dictogloss assists the students to build up textual coherence in their compositions.