A Study On Application Of Summary Writing To English Writing Teaching At Senior High School

Summary writing is a compound academic writing task of reading and writing.Since Zhejiang Province in 2016 and Shanghai Province in 2017 adopted summary writing as a new type of English writing tests in the New College Entrance Examination,the domestic studies on summary writing have gradually increased.Many previous studies indicated that summary writing could enhance the writing skills of EFL learners.However,foreign studies mainly focused on the application of summary writing in higher education,and the domestic scholars mainly tried to investigate what kind of teaching models could improve the summary writing ability of senior high school learners.What they have in common is that few studies regard summary writing as a teaching model to guide the teaching of English writing,especially in senior high school English.Summary writing,in short,is a brief restatement of the essential thoughts of longer composition(Ding,2009),which involves sentence reconstruction and synonymous conversion.On the one hand,it can not only train students' ability to extract key information and generalization of texts,but also cultivate learners' paraphrasing strategy.On the other hand,it can effectively promote the diversity of vocabulary and syntax in learners' writing,but also deepen learners' understanding of discourse structure.In view of the advantages of summary writing,the present study aims to explore the effectiveness of the teaching model of summary writing in the teaching of English writing in senior high school.The following questions are to be answered in the present study:(1)What are the effects of summary writing on learners' English writing ability in terms of syntax,vocabulary,cohesive devices,discourse structure and content?(2)What effect does the application of summary writing have on high-,mediumand low-proficiency learners' attitudes to English writing?Eighty-nine students of Grade Eleven in Xinyang Senior High School are involved in a twelve-week long experimental study.They are divided into an experimental and a control class.In the experimental class,the present study adopts the teaching model of summary writing to guide students' English writing,while the product-approach is usedin the control class.In the present study,pretest,posttest and interview are used as research instruments to analyze the collected data.The results show that the teaching model of summary writing is more effective than the product-approach,and the experimental class performs better than the control class in terms of syntax,vocabulary,cohesion and discourse structure.Furthermore,the participants at different proficiency levels gain from summary writing.For the high-proficiency learners,it could significantly improve the abilities of sentence reconstruction and vocabulary conversion.For the medium-proficiency learners,their abilities of sentence integration and vocabulary conversion has been improved to certain extent.For the low-proficiency learners,there is a small improvement in terms of their ability of sentence integration and vocabulary conversion.Their ability of diverse expressions of syntax and vocabulary still needs to be strengthened.In a word,summary writing has a positive effect on improving the writing ability of learners in senior high school.This teaching model is suitable for guiding the teaching of English writing in senior high school.