Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the research
As a commonly used teaching and learning method, recitation is a magic weapon intraditional Chinese education. Almost all the young learners begin with recitingnursery rhymes, ancient poems, and so on. Recitation has become an important part oflearning language knowledge and skills. By reciting beautiful articles and paragraphs,students can achieve the imitation and application of native language knowledge.
Nevertheless, concerning foreign language learning, due to the lack of anatural environment for foreign language acquisition, listening, speaking, reading andwriting are mostly derived from written materials. In English writing, good conditionsin words, phrases, sentence patterns and grammatical rules are required to complete afluent expression of sentences for the students in middle school. However, forChinese students, poor vocabulary and weak ability in English translation results inbad expressions in English writing. As a result, it is difficult for teachers to correctvarious mistakes in their writings and to conduct their teaching effectively.
The main problems in writing can be summarized as the following. Firstly,irrelevant vocabulary, problematic spellings, improper use of words, and incoherentparts of speech cause the whole sentence to be out of order. Secondly, grammar errorsprevail. Middle school students do not understand the five basic sentence patterns,which leads students to know little about what subject, verb, and object are. Eventhough there are many grammatical exercises in junior middle schools, most of themare in the form of multiple choice, sentence pattern conversion, etc. However, it is stilldifficult for middle school students to express themselves in English writing. Thirdly,incomplete discourse happens frequently. Some students do not carefully examinetopics to write about, write compositions that lack a certain link or point in the content,and express themselves with Chinglish here and there.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Research
This section begins with the purpose of the research, and then the significance of theresearch will be announced in the section.
1.2.1 Purpose of the Research
Junior high school students sometimes do not know how to write a composition, anddo not know how to improve their English writing level. Front-line teachers andresearchers are looking for an effective way to improve junior high school students’English writing. According to such second language acquisition theory as input-outputtheory, recitation and copying are of great significance to the improvement of juniormiddle school students’ writing ability.
First of all, the present research aims to promote the cultivation of cognitiveand thinking abilities through training students with model essays recitation, in otherwords, to test the effectiveness of reciting the model essays as a quick and gradualtraining method of English writing in middle school. Secondly, the research aims tohelp students develop good learning strategies and habits by examining whetherreciting model essays can virtually help students accumulate knowledge, and also playa subtle role, so that students will learn how to produce well-organized articles.
In this study, a combination of teaching experiments, a questionnaire and aninterview are applied to answer two research questions as: (1) Does recitation inputimprove students’ English writing proficiency? (2) What are the attitudes of thestudents in experimental class towards recitation input after experiments? By seekinganswers to the above research questions, the purpose of this study is to help Englishteachers find a more practical way to teach writing.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Recitation Input
This section mainly addresses recitation input and it is composed of the definition andexecutive strategies of recitation input.
2.1.1 Definition of Recitation Input
Recitation input is an input pr
