An Action Research On The Cultivation Of High School Students’ Ability Of Using Figures Of Speech For English Continuation Writing

This study combines the changes of the new curriculum and the new college entrance examination,based on teaching practice,and uses action research to focus on how to develop students’ ability to use English figures of speech,an explicit rhetorical device,based on the needs of English continuation writing,and to improve the effect of English continuation writing.This study was conducted with 50 students in a senior two class in a high school in J.Two rounds of action research were conducted in one semester of the 2022-2023 school year.The pilot study found that students’ overall language proficiency in English continuation writing was weak,lacking both awareness and almost no English figures of speech,which was related to the researcher’s neglect of rhetorical instruction in the usual classroom teaching process.The questionnaire also reflected that students expected teachers to use rhetorical instruction in their continuation writing instruction to help them improve their language skills in English continuation writing.Therefore,the purpose of this action research is to investigate: 1)how to effectively improve students’ ability to use figures of speech in continuation writing in high school English teaching;and 2)what is the impact of figures of speech on high school students’ English continuation writing skills?In response to the problems that emerged in the first round of action research,in which the researcher’s figures of speech were taught by a single means and students were still unable to use figures of speech proficiently in time-limited writing,the researcher adjusted the rhetorical teaching methods and focused more on teaching a particular figures of speech at a time in the second round of action,and used the micro-skills teaching means of continuation writing,i.e.,non-full continuation,shortened the length of continuation training(only 3-5 sentences continuation).The students’ awareness of the use of figures of speech and their ability to use figures of speech in time-limited training such as exams was attempted to be enhanced at a short and fast pace by increasing the frequency of output activities.Compared with the first round of action research in which only translation and sentence rewriting were used,the second round of action added activities such as sentence imitation and sentence fill-in-the-blank.After two rounds of action research,the researcher gradually explored an effective teaching method to improve high school students’ ability to use figures of speech in continuation writing.In the pre-class preparation stage,firstly,based on the figures of speech appearing in the textbook texts,the corresponding figures of speech examples inside and outside the classroom were supplemented,resources were expanded,a corpus based on common continuation topics was built,and the typical English figures of speech were well marked so that teachers could do a good job in designing the teaching of continuation writing based on figures of speech and preparing the guided study plan,and the students were assisted in recording the teaching process of figures of speech and the output of training results through the guided study plan.In terms of classroom teaching,the guide plan is based on identifying,analyzing and applying a certain figures of speech for systematic explanation and training;in terms of training methods,the figures of speech application ability of students in continuation writing is systematically cultivated by using sentence imitation,sentence filling,sentence translation,scene construction and other means with a gradient of difficulty,and by shortening the practice phrase and increasing the frequency of practice.The feedback and evaluation during and after the class are focused on positive evaluation,and the online corpus and student writing corpus are reasonably used to further confirm and evaluate students’ training output in class.The students can further reflect on and internalize their learning results to improve their ability to use figures of speech in continuation writing.After two rounds of learning and training,the impact of figures of speech teaching on high school students’ ability to read and write is mainly manifested in the following ways: 1)the students’ ability to use figures of speech in continuation writing is effectively improved.The analysis of students’ exercise texts shows that the quantity of figures of speech used in students’ exercises has increased significantly,and the accuracy and richness in quality have improved,and they try to use figures of speech in portraying characters,describing the environment,highlighting the theme and strengthening the main points,giving full play to the functions of figures of speech such as description and emphasis,and their awareness of figures of speech use has increased,improving their language skills and literary literacy at the same time.2)The analysis of interviews shows that after the implementation of figures of speech-based continuation writing instruction,the interest and attitude,writing performance,and writing ability of the students in this class have improved after continuation writing.At the same time,students were motivated to express themselves and not only used figures of speech frequently to enhance language expression,but even showed stronger comprehension and appreciation of narrative completions or narrative reading discourse,a spillover effect that surprised the researcher.The innovation of this study is to explore how figures of speech are systematically,concretely,and effectively implemented in high school English continuation writing class,using a corpus as an effective tool,and fully implementing multiple forms of evaluation feedback methods.The action research demonstrates that the use of figures of speech is an effective way to improve students’ language proficiency in continuation writing assignments that can be implemented at the high school level.