High School Students’ Avoidance In English Writing

Writing teaching is always the emphasis and difficulty of English teaching in high school.Writing is an important form of language output,and can reflect the students’ language learning ability and ability to organize thoughts from the word,phrase,sentence and discourse levels.Many factors influence the improvement of students’ writing ability,and avoidance is one of the most important factors.The fact is that avoidance has both positive and negative effects.On the one hand,avoidance strategies can help students achieve all or part of their communicative goals.On the other hand,when students avoid difficulties,they give up part of communicative purposes,so they fail to make language expand and improvement in communication,resulting in their language proficiency stagnation.The purpose of this thesis is to answer the following three research questions through the study of the current high school students’ avoidance in English writing.(1)What are the specific manifestations of English writing avoidance by high school students?(2)What are the reasons for the occurrence of avoidance phenomena?(3)What are the teaching strategies for avoiding students’ writing avoidance in combination with the theory of supervision hypothesis and the theory of communicative strategy?This thesis adopts the method of combining qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,include experiments,literature analysis,questionnaires and interviews methods,and use the statistical analysis tools such as Excel and SPSS 11.O.This thesis takes 158 senior high school students in Nanjing as the research object,and combined with students’ English test scores in September 2016 to analyze the performance of avoidance,reasons and countermeasures.Through the study,the following three main findings are obtained:(1)According to corpus analysis,it is found that the avoidance phenomenon of senior high school students in English writing is classified as lexical avoidance,syntactic avoidance,text avoidance and pragmatic avoidance,covering lexical choice,sentence structure,voice,tense and so on.(2)According to the survey results and the results of the interviews,the main reasons to avoid phenomenon:first,the students’ language ability is very limited,not sure what kind of expression is the best;second,personality,learning motivation and self-efficacy is closely related to avoidance phenomenon;third,the lack of input and the output material and method,is English writing test and evaluation methods of standardized test have a negative impact.(3)The cultivation of high school students’ English writing avoidance consciousness should not only meet the three conditions of students’ supervision,but also use positive communication strategies.Secondly,to increase the input and output of language knowledge,to improve students’ supervisory ability and English language expression ability;Thirdly,to increase cross-cultural communication,to cultivate cross-cultural awareness and avoid pragmatic errors.The establishment of a teaching model of English writing avoidance consciousness can help to eliminate or improve the avoidance phenomenon in senior high school students’ English writing.Therefore,in senior high school English writing teaching,the teaching objectives,teaching methods and evaluation methods should be further optimized.