The Effects Of Model Text Recitation On Secondary Vocational School Students’ English Writing Performance

This study is undertaken to investigate the effects of model text recitation on secondary vocational school students’ English writing performance in terms of vocabulary,sentence and discourse.An experiment and an interview were conducted to compare their writing performance before and after reading the model text in terms of vocabulary,sentence structure and discourse coherence.Three research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1.What effects does model text recitation have on secondary vocational school students’ writing performance on lexical level?2.What effects does model text recitation have on secondary vocational school students’ writing performance on syntactical level?3.What effects does model text recitation have on secondary vocational school students’ writing performance on discoursal level?Participants were 83 students from two parallel Senior Three classes in Yancheng Sports School with 42 students in the experimental class and 41 students in the control class.Research tools include two writing tests and an interview which was conducted among 10 students selected from the experimental class,Data analysis involved double scoring,calculation and comparison.All the compositions were scored by two experienced teachers with the same rating scale for Jiangsu Province Specialty-oriented Entrance English Examination.Then the data were processed by SPSS 25.0 with Paired Samples T-test.Analysis employed to calculate and compare students’ writing performance before and after the teaching experiment in terms of vocabulary,sentence structure and discourse coherence.This study has yielded the following major findings:Firstly,model text recitation has a positive effect on students’ writing performance on lexical level.For one thing,there is much comprehensible vocabulary provided for students in experimental class to memorize and use.For another,through recitation and imitation,students are inclined to use varieties of words to express their ideas in writing.Secondly,model text recitation enhances students’ writing skills on syntactical level.Quantitatively,their syntactical level improves a lot.Qualitatively,most of the students who took part in the interview reached a consensus that this English writing teaching approach enhances their syntactic complexity and diversity.Thirdly,model text recitation based English writing teaching improves students’writing performance on discoursal level.For one thing,their writing performance on organization level improves the most.For another,their post-test writing is better organized and more coherent with appropriate connection.The study provides the following implications.First of all,the difficulty of reciting materials should be slightly higher than the current level of students.At the same time,the model text must also be understandable and interesting to students.Secondly,teachers should pay attention to the guidance of recitation methods,and regularly check the results of recitation,so as to help students improve the efficiency of recitation and prevent forgetting.Finally,teachers should pay attention to the training of writing skills and help students master the writing methods of various subjects through a lot of exercises.In this case,the memorization of model text can help students improve the overall level of English writing.The study has three limitations.First of all,the sample size is not large enough to extend to all secondary vocational students.Second,the writing style is a given composition,resulting in a narrower research field.Third,the experimental time of this study is only 18 weeks,and it does not guarantee the long-term impact of the memorization of the model text on students’ writing.In view of this,the above findings need further verification.