A Study On Avoidance In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Avoidance is a commonplace phenomenon in the process of English writing.Many high school students tend to use easy and simple expressions in place of diversified and complex words and sentences when they come across difficulties in English writing,which entails the simplicity and repetition in language,and possibly the stagnation in students’ English writing progress.In view of this,the present research is intended to study avoidance in senior high school students’ English writing so as to improve their English writing ability gradually.Taking eight students from a senior high school in Shandong Province as the participants,this study adopts think-aloud protocols,text analysis and interview methods to analyze the avoidance in English writing and aims to answer the following questions: What are the types and frequency of avoidance in English writing for senior high students? What are the differences in the types and frequency of avoidance in English writing among different-level senior high students? What are the reasons for avoidance in senior high students’ English writing?The think-aloud protocols are transcribed and students’ English compositions are collected.The types and frequency of avoidance in English writing are identified and analyzed with the help of SPSS24.0 statistical package.The following results are obtained:Firstly,for high school students,the avoidance is manifested in topic,vocabulary and syntax.Among them,vocabulary avoidance is manifested in the uses of synonym,antonym,hypernym,interpretation and mother tongue transfer.Syntactic avoidance is manifested in the uses of active voice,simple sentence and formal sentence instead of passive voice,compound sentence and informal sentence.As to avoidance frequency,the frequency of vocabulary avoidance is the highest,followed by the syntactic avoidance,and topic avoidance is the lowest.Secondly,high school students of different levels have significant differences in the types and frequency of avoidance in English writing.On the whole,the types and frequency of avoidance in the low-level group are significantly more than those in the high-level group.Finally,the reasons for avoidance in high school students’ English writing could be summarized in subjective and objective aspects.Subjectively,avoidance occurs due to students’ psychology and inadequate English knowledge.Objectively,avoidance may occur in the following three aspects: the interference of native language,insufficient input of English knowledge and few output opportunities and the negative influence of writing teaching model.Based on the research results,this study provides the following suggestions for English teachers to effectively deal with the avoidance in students’ writing.In the process of teaching,it is advisable for teachers to guide students to objectively understand avoidance in English writing.Meanwhile,attempts can be made to help students gradually overcome the interference of the mother tongue.Furthermore,it is suggested that more English input and output should be integrated in English teaching and learning and the optimized ways of writing feedback are also inductive to improve students’ English writing.