| Writing is supposed to be one of the five basic skills in foreign language communication. Students’ English writing competence not only reflects their language use ability, but also embodies their language accomplishment indirectly. As a matter of fact, the junior high school students are still at primary stage of English learning. Then how to offer help to the students in building self-confidence, cultivating their interest in English writing and improving their writing competence is worth consideration for teachers.There is no doubt that recitation strategy, as a teaching method, plays an important part in English teaching. By reciting some useful materials, the students can deepen their understanding of the contents and structures of the English language, accumulating rich language materials as well as building up their language sense. Based on the theory of memetics, this study tries to explore the effects of recitation strategy applied in English writing teaching of junior high school by carrying out a three-month teaching experiment. And some research methods such as questionnaire, test and interview are adopted in this experiment to make a concrete study according to the following three research questions:(1) What are the current problems existing in English writing teaching of junior high school?(2) What are the main causes leading to these problems?(3) What impact does recitation strategy have on junior high school students’ English writing competence?In this study, 116 students from two parallel classes in the eighth grade of the First Junior High School in Wutou Town, Luoyang City are selected as the research subjects. The number of students in both classes is the same. During the whole experimental process, recitation strategy is used in writing teaching of Experimental Class(EC). While in the Control Class(CC), traditional writing teaching method is adopted as usual. To know more about the current problems in students’ writing process and the difference in their attitudes towards writing before and after the experiment, the author prepares a questionnaire for the students in EC. The students in both classes also receive a pre-test and a post-test, the results of which are collected and analyzed with SPSS. Besides, the author randomly chooses 10 students from EC to accept an interview after the post-test in order to acquire more information of their opinions on applying recitation strategy in English writing teaching.It’s not hard to find from the empirical data that the mean scores of EC in the post-test are higher than that of CC. Specifically, the mean scores of the vocabulary, grammar and text structure in EC are all higher than those in CC. That is to say, recitation strategy is of great help in improving the students’ English writing competence. Besides, the author concludes from the interview conducted in EC that most of the students hold a positive attitude towards the application of recitation strategy in writing teaching. And they believe that this strategy contributes to improving their writing ability.This thesis includes six chapters. Chapter One is introduction, in which the background and significance of this study, research questions as well as research methods are introduced. Chapter Two is literature review. It mainly reviews the relevant studies of English writing teaching and recitation strategy applied in English teaching at home and abroad. Chapter Three mainly introduces the theoretical basis of this research, that is, the memetics. Chapter Four focuses on the research design, including research objective, subjects, instruments and the concrete research procedure. Chapter Five offers a specific analysis of the empirical data collected from the questionnaire, interview and two tests. Chapter Six is conclusion, and it carefully sums up the major findings of the research and the limitations of this study, and presents some suggestions for further researches. |
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