A Study Of The Effect Of ME On The Accuracy Of Articles In English Writing Of Junior High School Students With Different LAA

Writing is an important skill that is difficult for foreign language learners to master.In addition,it is difficult for Chinese learners to acquire the knowledge and skill concerning English articles for there is no corresponding article system in their mother tongue Chinese.Therefore,students in China often misuse articles in English writing.At present,many researches at home and abroad hold different views on whether metalinguistic explanation can improve the accuracy of students’ writing.Besides,learners with different language analytic ability will produce different feedback effects.This study aims to explore the effect of metalinguistic explanation on the accuracy of articles in English writing of junior high school,as well as the influence of language analytic ability on the effect of metalinguistic explanation.Fifty-three junior high school students from Jingzhou city,Hubei province participated in this study.The study lasted nine weeks and consisted of eight tests and an interview,including the language analytic ability test,untimed grammar judgment test and pre-test,two intervention tests,immediate post-test and a post-test.Finally,a paired sample t-test was used to compare the accuracy scores of the articles used in the pre-test and post-test,and a Pearson correlation analysis was used to investigate the influence of language analytic ability on the effects of metalinguistic explanation.The main findings are as follows.First,students with different LAA all lack explicit knowledge of articles and do not know how to use articles accurately in their writing.Secondly,ME has both immediate and delayed effects on improving the accuracy of articles in English writing,but this effect tends to weaken with the passage of time.Finally,students’ LAA is positively correlated with the effect of ME on the accuracy of articles.The higher the student’s LAA,the more significant the short-term effect of ME on improving the accuracy of the article in the student’s writing.