Experimental Research On High School Students' English Summary Writing Based On The Mental Representation

Due to its new introduction and shortage of relevant studies,English summary writing has brought great confusion to the students.Through studying the mental representation characteristics of high-level group's summary writing,this paper,based on the theory of Mental Representation,hopes to analyze and summarize the teaching methods and modes,which are suitable for the high school English summary writing.On the basis of experimental research,this paper tries to answer the following two questions: 1.In summary writing,does the high-level group have its own mental representation and what's their mental representation?2.Does the teaching method of mental representation have a positive effect on the summary writing ability of the middle and low level students?This paper includes two experiments.In the first experiment,two classes(32 students in each class)of a high school in Ningbo are selected as the experimental class and the control class.According to the scores of summary writing pretest,the students are divided into three groups: high,middle and low level,and it focuses on analyzing the mental representation of high-level group during the process of summary writing with Think Aloud Method and introspection.And based on the result of the first one,in the second experiment,it carries out teaching penetration to experimental class in a conscious and systematical way.And through the comparison with the class of traditional teaching,it is tested whether the middle and low-level group in the experimental class have a corresponding improvement in the summary writing ability.The research results show that the high-level students have a more complete set of mental representation towards summary writing,including four abilities and six links(4A6L),which is a combination of the abilities of reading and analyzing,summarizing and concluding,language re-organizing and expressing.And it also has six important links,including fast reading,careful reading,summarizing and concluding,language re-organization,expression and application,as well as self-evaluation.Based on the results,“4A6L” High-Level Mental Representation Teaching Method Of Summary Writing is designed to train the students to construct their own high-level mental representation step by step.Finally,the training results indicates that “4A6L” Mental Representation Teaching Method is applicable to middle and low-level students in the summary writing,and that the middle-level students improve their summary writing abilities better than the low-level group.But the efficiency in improving the four abilities is different because of the plasticity,gradualness and continuity of the mental representation.It must point out that there is still room for further research.