The Effects Of Self-correction On English Letter Writing Competence Of Senior High School Students

With the development of globalization,English as one of the important languages to promote internationalization plays an important role in promoting the exchange between countries around the world.As an important way of communication,letters play an increasingly prominent role in high school English teaching and learning.Besides,with the introduction of Error analysis theory into China,students’ foreign language errors gradually got attention;however,there are still many problems in English letter writing in high schools,such as wrong format,improper use of words and sentences.In this context,this study applied the self-correction method to high school English letter writing teaching so as to explore the effects of self-correction on students’ English letter writing competence and then provide some teaching advice to English teachers.This study explored the effects of self-correction on students’ letter writing competence from the four aspects: vocabulary,sentence,text and mechanic details.The research subjects were selected from Grade Two in Dazhou No.1 Middle School,Sichuan.Before the experiment,students’ letter writing competence had been measured through the pre-test.In the course of the experiment,all the students were asked to write letters for four times,and each time the students had to do self-correction on the first draft and wrote the second draft according to the error correction situation for the first draft,and did self-correction on the second draft as well.The self-correction training about letter writing was carried out every two weeks.This research aims to investigate the effects of self-correction from two perspectives:the first one is the current situation of English letter writing in senior high school and the students’ attitude towards self-correction and the other is the effects of self-correction on senior high students’ letter writing competence.And for the second one,this research mainly focuses on four aspects: vocabulary,sentence,letter,text and mechanic detail.At the end of the experiment,the students’ writing samples and the two questionnaires were analyzed and compared.The major findings were presented:Firstly,Students’ attitude towards self-correction has changed significantly.Secondly,students have made significant progress in the four aspects: vocabulary,sentence,text and mechanic details because of the improvement of their awareness towards self-correction and their analyzing ability through continuous training of self-correction.Besides,the data also showed that the students have made the greater progress in vocabulary and mechanic details and have made less progress in text.To sum up,it can be concluded that self-correction can exert positive effects in the four aspects of high school students’ letter writing.Therefore,self-correction could be applied to the teaching of high school English letter writing,which can not only improve students’ English letter writing competence,but also improve students’ self-evaluation ability.