A Study On The Developmental Features Of Stylistic Formality Of High School Students' English Writing In Zhuang Ethnic Area

The stylistic formality is an important factor that reflects and influences the quality of English writing,and it is closely related to the stylistic awareness of L2 learners.At present,there have been a steady stream of studies on the writing formality both at home and abroad,but most of these studies are on the formality of high-level English leariners,and little has been done on the formality of English writing and stylistic awareness of high school students.This study adopts both quantitative and qualitative research methods.By means of such research instruments as self-built corpus,questionnaires and interviews,this study will investigate the formality development of high school students' English writing,their stylistic awareness and the factors influencing their stylistic awareness.The corpus of 600 English test compositions is derived from first grade to third grade of five different high schools in Guangxi Zhuang ethnic areas.The lexical density,adjective density and formality score are used as the measurements to investigate the formality development of the corpus.A total of 300 questionnaires and 15 interview records are collected to investigate the changes in students'stylistic awareness and to explore the factors affecting the development of formality and stylistic awareness from the perspective of teachers.The results show that:(1)The formality of the subjects'English writing presents an integral low degree,whereas it shows a positive trend of slow development with the growth of grade.Due to different measurement methods,the development speed of the formality at the same stage is different,but the overall development trend is consistent.In the third grade,the writing formality reaches the formal index of written language.(2)The stylistic awareness of high school students is relatively weak,but it is gradually strengthened with the growth of grade.The development trend of stylistic awareness almost coincides with the formality development trend of corpus,and the stylistic awareness of the senior grade is obviously stronger than that of the junior grade.(3)From the interviews of teachers,the possible factors influencing the development of formality and the stylistic awareness of students are mainly divided into three aspects:teacher's stylistic teaching factor;students'stylistic learning factor,and the stylistic learning environment.Based on the above results,this study tries to put forward some strategies to improve students' writing formality and cultivate their stylistic awareness:(1)As far as the teachers are concerned,it is vital for them to strengthen their stylistic knowledge reserve and improve their stylistic ability by learning the stylistic theory,cultivating and strengthening their stylistic awareness,and sharing stylistic teaching experience.In the teaching process,teachers should impart students more stylistic knowledge to cultivate and strengthen students'stylistic awareness in writing.(2)For students,establishing the concept of style and taking stylistic formality as an important criterion in writing quality are the good methods to improve their stylistic awareness.They should always consciously accumulate stylistic knowledge by the frequent contact with different styles of writing.And they need to pay attention to distinguish the applicable context of vocabulary,discriminate the differences of formal words and informal words and avoid using colloquial vocabulary in formal genre writing,etc.(3)In order to comprehensively improve students'stylistic awareness and stylistic ability,a proper stylistic learning environment is needed.Learning is never only about teaching and learning.It also needs to create an active and powerful stylistic learning environment for students from the aspects of education policy,curriculum requirements,teaching materials,evaluation criteria,and teaching model,etc.