An Emperical Study On The Development Of The Text Organizing Ability Of English Composition In High School From A Corpus-based Perspective

Writing ability is growing increasingly essential in second language learning.Previous studies have explored the factors,ranging from what cognitive strategies will be adopted,how the process will be developed,what background knowledge should be prepared for the task and how the text structure will be organized etc.,that could impact leaners' writing performance.The present study focuses on the development of the text organizing ability in high school students by applying the corpus-based teaching method to the writing class.This paper has combined the ability of connecting and that of complex syntactic forming as text organizing ability to study how it affects the way students in high school to organize their text structure and the path of the development between the students of different language proficiency.Corpus-based teaching methods were adopted in the writing class,this teaching innovation involved gathering the topic-related texts written by native speakers with the help of the online corpus COCA.A micro-corpus was built for students' observation in class,students should try to generalize the outline of the texts,the high-frequently used syntactic structures and the cohesive features as well as the context where these structures and features were used.After that,what they had found should be transferred to the text organizing task of a similar topic to improve their text organizing ability.CoMetrix3.0 and Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer were used,in experimental and control groups as well as post-test and pre-test in the control group,as the primary tools to gather and analyze the textural features related to the text organizing.Questionnaires,classroom observation and intensive interview were also employed as the date sources from different aspects,trying to ensure the reliability of the results both qualitatively and quantitively.After eight weeks' empirical study,one of the major findings was that while the corpus-based teaching could significantly improve the text organizing ability of the students in high school,the development path differed between the high-proficiency(HP)students and the low-proficiency(LP)ones: in LP students,preference was given to the improvement of the ability to connect and then to laying a complex syntactic structure,HP students made more progress on how to building a complex sentence.Another finding,through the co-relationship analyze,was that the writing performance of a LP student depended more on the ability to use the cohesive tools while a HP student on the complexity of the sentences in a text.In addition,this study also revealed a positive correlation between the writing performance of different proficiency and the number of writing strategies applied in the text reproduction.The results of the study contribute to adding evidence to the pedagogical researches on the application of corpus-based teaching to high school writing classes and operational plans were suggested.They also can be used as a guideline for multi-level writing class.