The Impact Of Chunk-based Spot Dictation Training On The English Writing Ability Of Junior High School Students

Dictation is a testing method in daily English teaching.It can not only help teachers provide effective input as content for classroom teaching,but also promote students to make use of the classroom input to integrate properly the output information,which will certainly have a positive impact on their writing.As a comprehensive language skill,writing is generally considered to be most difficult to improve,for it needs both language knowledge and language ability,which is an important indication for measuring students' comprehensive ability of English application.Lexical chunks,as an important part of English texts,are the bases for students to master and apply skillfully,in order to write efficiently and fluently,during which sufficient chunk input will help to improve students' writing quality.At present,however,English writing teaching at the primary stage of our country is mainly conducted based on reading text imitation and neglects how to guide students in effective obtaining of language input and deep processing of language knowledge,so that most students have lost interest and confidence in writing.Therefore,it is a key task for teachers to promote students to effectively input chunks in suitable situation and output authentic and complete English texts,so as to improve junior high school students' English writing ability.This study,based on Chunk Theory,dictation classification and related research findings at home and abroad,and guided by Krashen's input hypothesis,Swain's output hypothesis and short-term memory theory,attempted to make a comparative analysis of the possible impact that chunk-based partial dictation training could bring to junior high students' English writing.The study selected 30 students from Grade Eight of a county junior high school in the suburb of XX County,Shandong Province as the research objects,and adopted teaching experiment and interview methods,trying to answer the following questions:(1)What changes junior high school students will experience in terms of their mastery and application of chunks after receiving spot dictation training?(2)How does junior high school students' mastery of chunks affect their discourse structure,content integration and grammar application in subsequent essay writing?(3)How well do junior high school students accept the chunk-based partial dictation?The final results show that:(1)From the experimental data,compared with the control group,the students in the experimental group have made more significant progress in the number and appropriateness of chunks used in the subsequent discourse creation after receiving spot dictation training based on chunks;(2)The effect of junior high school students' mastery and application of chunks on their later writing are mainly reflected in the improvement in terms of writing content integration,text structure and grammar application;(3)The interview resultsindicated that the application of this training method was much helpful for students to make use of chunks in particular situation and organize their text structure.Most students responded that through spot dictation based on chunks,their enthusiasm and confidence in English writing are greatly stimulated.On this basis,the study could suggest that teachers should constantly change and adjust the application skills and times of dictation in order to promote students' motives in writing,and to prevent students from getting bored of writing.What's more,teachers,according to the requirements of English curriculum standards,should have a good command of knowledge about lexical chunks,optimize dictation training skills,so as to promote more effective English writing instruction.There are,of course,some shortcomings in this study,due to the limitations of time and conditions.But on the whole,this study has basically achieved its expected goals.It could provide useful suggestions for junior middle school teachers in adopting appropriate teaching methods and techniques in English writing teaching,and provide practical reference for further effective use of dictation for promotion of junior high school students' writing performance.