Effects Of Story Retelling On Lexical Complexity In Junior High School Students’ English Writings

In the process of L2 learning,vocabulary is one of the most important factors that determines L2 writing quality.In today’s English classroom,vocabulary teaching still depends mainly on traditional teaching methods.In order to improve students’ competence of using English words and their second language writing level,there are more and more researches in the fields of vocabulary acquisition and second language writing teaching.In the context of the new curriculum reform and in view of the reality of English teaching in China,story retelling has been deemed to be a positive and effective second language teaching method.However,researches that focus on the effects of retelling on L2 writing are not often seen in SLA.The purpose of this research is to study the effect of story retelling teaching method on lexical complexity in junior high school second language writing,which is designed to find an effective method for promoting English vocabulary and writing teaching.There are three research questions to be addressed in this study:(1)What is the current situation of the lexical complexity regarding the junior high school students’ English Writings?(2)Can English story retelling approach improve junior high school students’ lexical complexity in their English writings? If yes,to what extent?(3)What are students’ attitudes towards the English story-retelling teaching approach?The participants of this study are 83 students from two parallel classes of Grade8 in a junior middle school in Pingxiang City,Jiangxi Province.This study adopts the method of combining quantitative and qualitative research.The compositions of EC and CC students in the pretest and post-test are mainly analyzed by using Range 32,Vocabprofile,and other software.Six students are randomly invited to participate in semi-structured interviews.At the last chapter of this thesis,the author reveals three main research results:(1)The performance of junior high school students in L2 writings is not so good and there is a lot of room for improvement on the lexical complexity of junior high school students in English writings.(2)Through the analysis of EC and CC,it is found that story retelling can effectively improve the lexical diversity of junior high school students in English writings.However,there is no considerable improvement in the other two aspects of lexical complexity,which are lexical density and lexical sophistication between EC and CC.(3)Through interview analysis,it is found that students think story retelling is effective for vocabulary acquisition and English writing,and it can make traditional English classes lively and interesting,whose promotion and popularization have also been supported and recognized.However,this method is time-consuming.Here,results show that story retelling strategy plays a positive role in the use of different words in students’ writings,and lexical diversity is also one of the most important factors in students’ writing proficiency.This also illustrates that story retelling can make significant differences on composition scores between EC and CC.At the end of this paper,the limitations and some related research advice have been listed to contribute for the future studies on the lexical complexity in English writings.