A Study On Senior High School Students’ Writing Problems In Translating Their Thoughts Into Written Language

As a complex cognitive activity,writing in essence is a process of translating a writers’ inner thoughts into written language,which involves constant interaction between the writer’s thoughts and his language resources.In the end writer delivers his ideas in the form of written language.However,for many second language learners,this translating process does not go smoothly,instead,they will meet various difficulties when searching and retrieving linguistic resources to express their ideas.These difficulties are viewed as writing problems in the present study,and they are cognitive problems in nature.Previous studies on writing problems mostly adopt textual analysis to describe and generalize students’ linguistic errors,such as grammatical and lexical errors.But these superficial language problems can’t reveal the cognitive sources behind.And for the existing studies on writing cognitive problems,their findings are mostly too general or focus only on lexical retrieval problems.A comprehensive and detailed picture of problem types is yet to be identified.What’s more,plausible solutions for these problems are rarely explored.Therefore the present study attempts to uncover the various writing problems senior high students encountered when translating their inner thoughts into written language,and tries to explore possible solutions by referring both students and teachers’ perception of these problems.In order to achieve this goal,the present study conducted a think-aloud experiment to investigate the mental activities in writing of12 grade two students,and interviewed 6 students and 3 teachers to explore possible solutions.The research questions put forward are as follows:1.What kinds of problem will senior high students encounter when translating their thoughts into written language?2.In which ways do students expect these problems to be solved?3.Compared with students’ expectations,what have teachers done or failed to do to deal with these problems ?After data analysis,major findings are:1.Senior high students’ problems in translating their thoughts into written language fall into two major categories,namely lexical problems and syntactical problems.Specifically,lexical problems include retrieving word/lexical chunks,choosing appropriate vocabulary,spelling out the correct word,choosing correct word form and avoiding vocabulary repetition.And syntactical problems involve restructuring,integrating long sentence,sequencing sentence components and applying syntactical rules.The lexical problems far outnumber syntactical problems.2.The students interviewed reported that they expected teachers can help them solve these problems through building a systematic linguistic corpus,providing model texts,practicing on language basics and writing,cultivating their ability of thinking in English as well as improving evaluation methods.3.In solving these problems,teachers’ measures include providing language resources and writing samples,cultivating English thinking ability through providing authentic language input and adopting different evaluating criteria.Compared with students’ expectations,they failed in guiding student producing English output,building a systematic and well-organized language corpus,spending more time on writing teaching and provide more detailed evaluation.Based on the various problems students met and the deficiencies in writing teaching,the present study put forward some feasible problem-solving strategies,hoping to improve senior high students’ writing fluency and quality.