A Study Of Avoidance In English Writing Of High School Students Based On Vocal Thinking

English writing is not only an effective way to test English learners’ ability to output,but also an important way to evaluate their ability of thinking.Because the writing task have higher requirements on students’ English application ability,most students are worried about writing tasks.Many factors that affect students’ writing proficiency,avoidance is one of the important elements.This study finds that there is a variety of avoidance in the process of students’ English writing.To handle the problem,this study attempts to employ the think aloud protocols to dig out the effect of avoidance on the quality of students’ English writing.The think aloud protocols can make learners’ implicit learning process explicit.By studying these explicit characteristics,the researcher can observe learners’ cognitive processing of each step of writing.Therefore,this research guided by the method of thinking aloud protocols combine quantitative and qualitative methods to study the avoidance.In this study,six students from a senior high school in Weifang City,Shandong Province are chosen as the research subjects.By means of recording and retrospective interviews,the researcher of this study focuses on the avoidance phenomenon in the subjects’ English writing,aiming at exploring the following:1.What types of avoidance can be found in senior high school students’ English writing? And what is the frequency of each type?2.What are the differences in responses to the avoidance in writing among students with different writing competence?This study makes analysis of the data collected from the recorded and transcribed texts.With the joint help of the interviews,the study concludes in the following findings:1.The avoidance phenomena of the subjects falls into three types: the levels of vocabulary,sentence,and pragmatics.Among these three types of avoidance,the frequency of vocabulary avoidance is the highest,sentence avoidance is the second,and the lowest frequency of pragmatic avoidance.2.The subjects with different language proficiency levels adopt different strategies to handle the avoidance.The subjects on the middle to high level tend to use the strategy of detour or giving up.The subjects on the low level usually take such measures as detour,L1 transfer,repetition and giving up.At the same time,the high-leveled subjects behave more actively to cope with avoidance by using more effective avoidance strategies,while the middle and low-leveled subjects behave more passively and prefer passive strategies.This study reveals the impact of avoidance on senior high school students’ English writing quality,explores the types of avoidance and the performance differences of students at different language levels.In addition,this study puts forward the following solutions: increasing the input of vocabulary and syntax structure,helping students to establish conceptual semantic network of vocabulary and syntax,and increasing the output training of students’ vocabulary and syntax knowledge.The purpose of this study is to provide useful enlightenment for improving the writing level of senior high school students.