Research On The Effects Of Text Analysis On Senior High School Students’ English Summary Writing Abilities

Summary writing is a kind of written expression based on reading comprehension.Highlighting the meaning of the text,it is an organic combination of language input and output.It requires students to understand the overall structure and extract important contents on the basis of careful reading and analysis of the source text.Subsequently,students use their own words to reorganize a short cohesive and coherent text-the English summary without changing the meaning of the original text.Furthermore,this type of writing is a test of students’ comprehensive language ability and learning ability,and it helps students improve their thinking abilities in the practice process(Wang Yang,2019).Therefore,the English summary writing is linked to the cultivation of students’ language ability,thinking quality and learning ability in the English subject’s key competencies.The concept of “text” has been given great attention for the first time in the New Curriculum.As the main carrier of language learning,the text conveys information and cultural knowledge.It helps students acquire learning strategies and develop language skills through its unique structure and organization with different types.At the same time,it provides support for students to form correct values and a good thinking in English learning.Therefore,the “text” is particularly emphasized in the description of students’ language skills in the New Curriculum,because the improvement of receptive and expressive abilities requires the understanding of the text knowledge and text meaning.Text analysis teaching,starting with the analysis of the source passage as a whole,has changed the traditional "bottom-up" teaching model,and surpassed the stage of explaining and translating words or sentences literally.Instead,it guides students to focus on the overall structure and central idea of the text first,and then to analyze the cohesion and coherence between paragraphs or sentences.It aims to help students master the passage theme and understand small language units’ meaning based on the entire text.Therefore,based on text analysis theory and systemic-functional grammar,this research analyzed the text context,text type,and the cohesive devices and coherence of the source materials.It was hoped that the text analysis could improve students’ abilities of reading comprehension and written expressions in English summary writing.Three questions were mainly focused on in this research:(1)What effects does the text analysis teaching have on senior high school students’ comprehension of the original text before writing their English summary?(2)What effects does the text analysis teaching have on senior high school students’ presentation of the key points and the overall structure of their English summary writing?(3)What effects does the text analysis teaching have on senior high school students’ cohesion and coherence in their English summary writing?Research participants were students in two parallel classes in Grade 1,No.2Senior High School,Dalian Pulandian District,Liaoning Province.Among them,Class 7 with 46 students was the controlled class while Class 8 with 44 students was the experimental class.With comparable writing levels,these two classes were taught by the same teacher with the same teaching materials and teaching schedule.The controlled class used the traditional teaching approach while the experimental class adopted text analysis to teach English summary writing.Questionnaires,pretest and post-test were the main instruments to collect data.The tool of SPSS 23.0 was applied to process the data.Finally,results demonstrated that the text analysis exerted a positive influence on senior high school students’ English summary writing abilities.Firstly,the English summary writing combining with text analysis was beneficial to improving students’ reading comprehension of the original text before writing.Secondly,the key points presented were more comprehensive and the overall structure was more complete and coherent in students’ summary than before.Thirdly,this teaching method had a positive effect on students’ summary cohesion and coherence.The use of cohesive devices became more diverse and accurate,and the textual meaning became more coherent than before.Therefore,the text analysis was of certain significance to the improvement of the English summary writing abilities of students in senior high school.Some suggestions provided in this research are expected to be helpful to the later English summary writing in senior high school.However,due to the short period of experiment during the practicum teaching and the limited number of participants in this study,further research needs to explore the effects of text analysis on senior high school students’ English summary writing abilities.