Application Of Dictogloss To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Writing,as a language productive skill,plays a significant role in senior high school English teaching.However,most students consider English writing as a thorny task and have relatively low writing proficiency.Therefore,improving students’ English writing ability has become a permanent goal that researchers and teachers have been pursuing.Dictogloss,emerging in the 1990 s,provides new ideas for English writing teaching.This method is different from the conventional dictation method in that it is text-based,prioritizes students’ needs and uses meaning negotiation among students as the means.Based on the theories of cooperative learning,meaning negotiation and scaffolding theory,this thesis aims to testify the effectiveness of dictogloss on the overall English writing achievements of senior high school students,and then further explore the effectiveness of dictogloss on students’ English writing fluency,complexity and accuracy,and find out students’ attitudes towards dictogloss.To be more specific,this thesis intends to explore following three questions:(1)What effects does dictogloss have on senior high school students’ overall English writing achievements?(2)What effects does dictogloss have on fluency,complexity and accuracy of senior high school students’ English writing?(3)What attitudes do senior high school students have towards dictogloss in English writing teaching?To address the above-mentioned questions,a three-month experiment is conducted with 110 students from two parallel classes of senior two in a senior high school in Lanzhou.One class is randomly chosen as the experimental class(EC)to receive dictogloss method,and the other is the control class(CC),which is taught with product approach.In the first week of the experiment,the author conducts a pre-test in EC and CC to check whether they are suitable for the research.In the next week,the author introduces dictogloss to students in EC and divides them into groups.From week 3 to week 10,EC applies dictogloss to English writing teaching,and CC uses product approach to teach English writing as usual.After eight-week treatment,students in both classes participate in a post-test.After that,students in EC finish a questionnaire and nine students of different levels in EC are interviewed about their opinions and suggestions on the dictogloss method.All the collected data are analyzed by SPSS 25.0 software.The major results of this thesis can be summarized as follows.(1)According to the results of writing tests,the students in EC gain more improvement in their writing achievements.Thus,it can be inferred that dictogloss has positive effects on students’ overall English writing achievements.(2)With regard to English writing fluency,complexity and accuracy,dictogloss can effectively improve students’ length of English compositions,the mean length of the T-units and error-free T-units ratio in a piece of English writing,which means dictogloss can influence students’ English writing fluency,complexity and accuracy positively.(3)Through the questionnaire and interview,it can be concluded that most students in EC have positive attitudes towards dictogloss,and they are willing to receive dictogloss teaching method in future study.In addition,according to the results of interview,the students at intermediate level hold more positive attitudes towards dictogloss than the students at other two levels.This thesis also states some pedagogical implications for dictogloss teaching.For instance,when choosing teaching materials,the length,difficulty,and topic of the text should be appropriate to students.Besides,although dictogloss is student-centered,the role of teachers matters.What is more,teachers should modify dictogloss lessons according to students’ English proficiency.In addition,dictogloss can be extended to extra-curriculum exercises.