探究中学生英语写作中的问题及解决策略

论文总字数：48017字

摘 要

对于大多数中学生而言，在听、说、读、写四项技能中，很多学生认为写实为四项技能中最难的一项，但是不得不承认，写作在英语学习中是培养和提高英语语言能力的有效手段，英语写作的好坏在一定程度上决定了一张英语试卷的成功与否。它有助于巩固和掌握包括词汇、语法在内的语言知识，有助于训练学生直接用所学语言进行思维，有利于提高学生驾驭语言的能力。现在的中学生英语写作存在许多问题，例如：语法错误，使用模板，文章缺乏感情或逻辑思维，以及学生因为不知道如何遣词造句，词汇量不足而只能干巴巴写几句，久而久之学生面临“下笔难”问题。本文旨在探讨中国中学生英语写作中存在的问题以及解决策略，从而提高中学生的英语写作水平。

关键词：英语写作；问题；解决策略

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

3. Results and Analysis of Problems 3

3.1 Results from questionnaire 3

3.2 Classification and analysis of problems 9

4. Solutions to Problems 16

4.1 Mobilizing the enthusiasm of students in English writing 16

4.2 Developing cross-cultural awareness 17

4.3 Selecting the appropriate way of teaching English Writing 18

4.4 Writing assessment: an integration of outcome and process assessment 19

4. Conclusion 20

Works Cited 21

Appendix 22

1. Introduction

With the development of English teaching and the deepening of curriculum reform, English writing is becoming more and more important. English, as one of the most important international languages, is widely used in people"s daily life, learning, work and communication. Therefore, it is particularly important to use English fluently and correctly. According to the latest "Syllabus of Middle School English", students must be skilled in using the vocabulary, idioms and sentence patterns to make well-formed sentences. However, most students cannot write coherent sentences and express their ideas freely and correctly. The present situation of English writing in China is far from satisfactory. Therefore, it is necessary to make a deep and careful study on the problems existing in Chinese students" English writing.

Through tracing a survey of middle school students" English writing, it is found that the traditional methods of teaching and training in English writing are relatively tedious and lagging. Teachers pay more attention to the writing results and ignore the guidance process before writing. Students" writing also shows that their information process is messy. A large part of the written sentences do not conform to the language standards of the English-speaking countries. They express themselves inappropriately and unidomatically. The biggest shortcoming of current students’ writing is to write English essays in the mother tongue, and Chinese-style English sentences often appear in students" essays. At the same time, students lack a solid foundation in English, making it impossible to improve the level of English writing. Through a dialogue with students, it can be found that most students are very reluctant to write an English essay for these answers: "we don"t know what to write" "too boring" and "we can"t find equivalent expressions in English". This phenomenon can be exemplified in the analysis of the English mid-term examination of KaiMing Middle School in Huaiyin district.

The main body of this paper consists of five parts. The first part introduces background of the research. In this section, the necessity and purpose of this study are clearly discussed. The second part is literature review. The third part is the analysis and discussion, which is the focus of this paper. Based on the results of the questionnaire, this study focuses on the problems in middle school students" English writing. The fourth part makes a list of strategies to solve the problems in question. Last but not the least, the last part makes conclusions.

2. Literature Review

Foreign language writing originated from rhetoric, and the focus on the so-called “writing environment” (the title, the reader, and the purpose of writing) was the tradition of foreign language writing. The teaching of writing including its process, results, environment is the focus of current research on international language writing. Some scholars have pointed out that there is an “unbalanced” phenomenon in the research of international second language writing：The results of empirical research on second language writing are few, and the research on the second language learners in English-speaking countries is relatively concentrated. In addition, the training of teachers of second language writing, the transfer ability of mother tongue in writing and the research on writing corpus will be the main trend in the future of writing research. For the development of second language writing in the early 21st century, Tony Silva believes that providing support for multilingual research will be a major research task in the next few decades. It can be seen that there are not many research results in L2 writing at present.

Since the 1980s, the study of English writing in our country has been gradually under exploration. The content, quantity, and method of research have undergone great changes. Li Zhixue, Li Shaoyan, Yao Lan and Cheng Lini pointed out that many existing problems in the study of English writing in China have been resolved or partially solved in the last decade. For example: There are so many repeated studies and discussions on the same topic, but now most of them have adopted new theories or different research perspectives into research; Since writing itself has a strong sense of subjectivity, but assessment of writing level has always lacked objective and scientific methods. Although this issue is still not fundamentally solved, domestic researchers are trying to find out a more objective assessment model, do more actively research and develop related software about composition evaluation, discuss the types of ratings and feedback, and introduce foreign advanced system of self-evaluation.

At the same time, teachers in non-English-speaking countries need to pay attention to how to improve students" ability of English writing. According to William H. Roberts, teachers should focus on the existence of language problems in their writing. They think that paying attention to language problems can promote students’ ability in English writing. Thankfully, more and more teaching methods in writing are constantly proposed, verified, improved or overturned, repeating the process to promote further research in the field of writing.

Although writing researches are prone to be diversified, there are still some problems. The samples in current empirical researches are too small, the research cycles are too short, and the teaching methods of writing are single and lag behind, all of these directly affect the credibility and persuasiveness of writing research. Meanwhile, studies attach more importance to writing ability of college students’. Among the empirical study of foreign language writing published in the domestic and foreign language journals, about 93% are related to college students, and there is too little attention for other levels of learners. Compared with the wide range of research on foreign language writing, the scope of China"s writing research needs to be further expanded.

3. Results and Analysis of Problems

3.1 Results from questionnaire

The questionnaire survey was conducted in the seventh grade and the ninth grade for the students to answer. A total of 100 copies were distributed and 100 were returned, covering students of two different levels. The effective rate reached 100%.

Through the survey, the author found that 56% of students believe that English writing is very difficult and that 65% of students write compositions only in order to pass the exam. With the exception of a few students who love English writing, others lack the initiative and enthusiasm for English writing. Dealing with an exam is the sole motivation for students to learn writing. Therefore, most students often regard English writing as a burden and are not willing to spend time and energy on it. So, how to cultivate students’ interest in writing and transfer the interest into a stable learning motivation are the focuses of teaching of writing. Meanwhile, Students themselves should also have the awareness of active learning in writing. In order to produce positive results in learning process, the attitude towards learning is very important, as all the students know that the negative attitude will only produce side effects on learning.

During the investigation, the author found that there are multiple factors leading to writing difficulties. Vocabulary is one of the essential elements of writing a good passage. To write a good article，a good foundation of vocabulary is indispensable. Grammatical and syntactical knowledge are also the basic elements of English writing. For instance, if a teacher in KaiMing Middle School scores a hundred students’ English papers, he/she found that the majority of papers have problems in syntactic irregularity and logical confusion causing Chinese style English. This fully reflects the importance of improving the ability of understanding and using English correctly, constantly expanding the students’ cultural horizon, and developing the awareness of intercultural communication. The first step to achieve the goal is that ensuring all the students master the elementary grammar knowledge.

More than half of students don’t write an outline in advance but write article itself directly. This is the main reason for the confusion of paragraph logic in their passages. Because of limited time for examinations, students have no idea of what to write when seeing the topic of the composition, which causes them to make some mistakes in sentence structure and word choice. After teachers’ correction, only 18% of students can take their mistakes in writing seriously and inquire the teacher actively, while half look at the mistakes pointed out by teachers randomly or correct their lingual errors under teacher"s forceful demands. It indicates that most of students are still “blind” to their own mistakes. Therefore, teachers ought to change students" learning attitude towards teaching. Firstly, teachers should cultivate students" good writing habits and ask students to write an outline before writing. This approach will greatly help to solve the problem of confusion in their writing and grammatical difficulties. In addition, each student should attach importance to the teacher"s marking. Only by carefully reading the teacher"s comments can students find the crux of their writing.

All the people know that there are certain differences in the cultural background of different languages. For Chinese students, cultural differences between Chinese and English are particularly prominent. These require students to be consciously aware of differences and compare their differences. During learning process, students ought to pay more attention to some good words, beautiful sentences, and consciously remember them more. As a result, they can use the language correctly, which can equip them with some language materials, getting well ready for language learning. The survey shows that 47% of the students just read elegant words and sentences, do not recite and accumulate conscientiously. The most worrying situation is that the improvement of students’ writing ability is mostly under the guidance of teacher, and few students actively improve their level of English writing. This requires teachers to adopt active and effective teaching methods to help students solve difficulties in writing. Meanwhile, the most important step is to help students practice, improve their writing ability and follow their hearts instead of teachers’ demand.

When it comes to the role of English teacher, students generally regard the teacher as dictionary and monitor. This leads students to inquire teacher directly when they are in trouble, and fully comply with the demands of teachers. Students lack initiative and autonomy during their learning process. Nearly half of the students hope that English teacher can help them find out all the mistakes in writing. However, 41% of the students hope that the teacher can line out mistakes to improve their writing skills by thinking and correcting mistakes by themselves. As teachers, they must pay attention to the guidance during students" writing process and properly play their role properly. English teacher should act as mentor rather than substitute. When scoring students" mistakes, the teacher often asks students themselves to find mistakes and understand how to correct mistakes.

Finally, in the subjective question, students put forward a lot of suggestions, which can be roughly divided into three kinds: firstly, creating a happy atmosphere in the writing class. All the students do not like vapid and dull atmosphere, thus they suggest the writing class should be relaxing and entertaining, as well as improving their English writing in the laughter; Secondly, inquiring clear demands from their writing teacher. To be honest, students want enough creative space, but specific requirements will make their articles more precise. As everyone knows, art comes from life, but rules are indispensable. Thirdly, students should be the center of writing class. In their minds, they all want a diversified class, so that they have access to different cultures. In class, they want teachers to give them more time and opportunities to practice, because they understand that simple explanations cannot improve their writing abilities practically.

Through the questionnaire, we understand the real situation of students in English Writing, that is, most of the students do not like writing, and even have the psychology of escapement and antipathy. They are forced to write English under the pressure of the exam. They also realize some problems which make them unable to raise their English writing scores. These problems refer to their limited size of vocabulary, lack of solid grammatical knowledge and ignorance of writing skills and discourse cohesion. After a careful inquiry of the ideas about their writing, most of the students write the passage directly after getting the title of the composition, without enough thinking. Moreover, they do not have a spirit of "insisting on getting to the bottom of the matter" after looking into teachers’ correction. These problems are also need to be resolved by English teachers during the process of teaching. These problems also deserve teachers" deeply thinking. It is delightful to find that students know their problems in writing and they are also looking for ways to improve writing. Next, the author will analyze the problems found from the questionnaire, including the negative transfer of Chinese, grammar and the influence of the internal and external environment.

3.2 Classification and analysis of problems

3.2.1 Negative transfer of Chinese

The theory of Second Language Acquisition expresses that transfer is the effect of mother tongue on the acquisition of a second language or foreign language. When some characteristics of the mother tongue are similar to or completely identical to the target language, the mother tongue will promote the learning of the target language, which is called positive transfer; When certain characteristics of the mother tongue does not correspond with the target language, and if learners try to learn the target language with the help of the mother tongue, the mother tongue will have great interference to the target language, which is called negative transfer. The linguistic structure of Chinese and English is very different, and also there are great differences between Eastern and Western cultures. Before people learn a foreign language, learning rules and habits of their native language have been formed, and they will unconsciously take it as the starting point to understand and acquire knowledge and structure of the new language. In the absence of English learning environment and knowledge of English language, students will consciously apply Chinese thinking and knowledge to English writing.

For example, a student at KaiMing middle school once wrote: Some people at home with their family speak their country language. The student completely made sentence in accordance with the corresponding Chinese word. Chinese pays attention to the use of "sense" and puts ‘modifiers’ in front of the center words; but English focuses on “unity”, using structural words like preposition and conjunction to keep the balance of sentences. Therefore, the sentence can be modified into: Some people speak mother tongue with their family at home.

In addition, Chinese has obvious "subject consciousness", so some students often begin with "person" when writing. But English pays attention to "object consciousness", using passive voice, and even using an object that cannot carry out action as the subject in a sentence, such as: The flowers smell sweet. In English writing, students are often influenced by Chinese language, culture and thinking mode which promoting them to use Chinese rules and expressions. According to the survey by Rhodes Ellis, 51% of the English errors in writing are due to negative transfer of Chinese.

To reduce the effect of negative transfer of Chinese on students" writing and improve their abilities of English writing, three factors must be taken into consideration: vocabulary, syntax and discourse.

Negative transfer of vocabulary

At the lexical level, Eugene Nida, an America translation theorist, pointed out that each language has its unique functions of word formation, word order and language styles, such as idioms and poetry. Each language has a large number of words to reflect the characteristics of its culture. But in the long process of development, different languages have different expressions of the same thing, or people cannot find the equivalent expression in another language. Students are often accustomed to finding some so-called equivalent lexical items that fail to express what they want to, this is because they do not acquire the shade of meaning in synonyms. In one of students’ compositions, he/she written: (1) The telephone is very convenient for people. Except this, it also saves much time and energy. (2)Though making a call spends more money, it is more convenient than posting a letter. (3) Wherever you are, you won"t be alone with a telephone. In the sentence (1), the student confuses the words "besides" and "except". Except means "not including," and Besides means "in addition to; also". In sentence (2), the student also confuses "spend" and "cost". In Sentence (3), he/she does not distinguish that Alone means “pure singleness”, and Lonely means “emotional loneliness”. It is this inconsistency that has created obstacles in students" English writing.

Therefore, it must be used according to actual circumstances. At the same time, Chinese does not have a similar affix and word class of Chinese cannot be distinguished by the form of Chinese. The same Chinese vocabulary often has different functions and reflects different word class. For English learners whose native language is Chinese, they often transfer the characteristics of the Chinese vocabulary to learn and use of English vocabulary, thus causing errors in the application of English vocabulary. First of all, in Chinese, there are a large number of words that can be used as verbs or nouns with no change in form. In English, most words need to be affixed when they are converted from verbs to nouns. Students can"t get rid of the influence of their mother tongue when writing, and they may write directly “According to my observe, he is very clever.” “My understand of this passage is that...” Therefore, students often make mistakes because of misusing some words. The second is the negative transfer of vocabulary. Different languages have their own unique ways and habits in using words. Therefore, at the level of vocabulary matching, learners are vulnerable to using the wrong combination because of their mother tongue. The collocation meaning of some adjectives representing color cannot be corresponding in English and Chinese. Such as "gray hair（白发）", "brown sugar（红糖）", "black tea（红茶）", "be beaten black and blue（遍体鳞伤）" and so on. Because English learning in China tends to be exam-oriented, students" vocabulary learning is still in the cognitive stage. As time goes on, some of the words they learnt become blurred, so careless students will make mistakes and transfer the habit of Chinese to English.

Negative transfer of Syntax

Although middle school students have mastered certain English sentence patterns, they still cannot completely get rid of the shackles of syntactic knowledge of Chinese, so when syntactic knowledge is used to express ideas, negative transfer would be produced. English and Chinese are completely different languages, and their syntactic structures have their own characteristics. (1) English is a hypotactic language. Whether it is a word or a phrase or a clause to be connected into a sentence, it cannot be separated from a conjunction such as and, but, or, because, so, however, if, since, unless, while, or other related words such as that, which, etc.; or prepositions such as between, in, with. Chinese is a paratactic language, and its structure does not have the condition of morphological change. It can only express meaning by notional words and word order, so the Chinese language is directly linked to meaning. Influenced by this, students often translate the sentence “他不诚实，我不相信他” into “He is not honest, I can’t trust him.” (2) English and Chinese are also different in terms of ellipsis. Most of the ellipsis of English is accompanied by structural mark, which means that the sentence is still grammatical when it is omitted; however, in Chinese, as long as the meaning of expression can be understood, anything can be saved without considering whether the grammar is correct or the logic is reasonable. Affected by Chinese language, many students translate the sentence “当问到毕业后干什么,大多数学生选择经商”into “When asked what kind of job they will take after graduation, most of college students choose business”. (3) There is no obvious language mark at the beginning and the end of Chinese sentences. The clause can be an independent sentence. Even if a sentence is changed several times, the subject can still be used. However, in English, the integrity of sentences is very clear. The Chinese sentence“看电视就方便多了,不要出门就可以看节目”can be understood easily, but if in English, the sentence“Watching TV is more convenient, and stay at home to enjoy programs” does not conform to the habits of English expression, because “Watching TV” can be the subject of “more convenient”, but cannot be the subject of “stay at home to enjoy programs”, so it must be cut off with the appropriate subject and add another subject to a new sentence. (4) Because there is no grammatical restriction, the amount of information in a Chinese sentence is very flexible and can be extended indefinitely, so the situation of “commas connect all the sentences” appears in various styles (essays, novels, argumentative papers, etc.). Influenced by it, students often unwittingly link many simple sentences with commas or conjunctions when writing English compositions, which makes the modifiers unsuitable, and the sentence is heavy, and so on. For example:众所周知,知识就是力量,一个国家没有知识就没有发展。Students may write like: “As we know, knowledge is power, there has no development without knowledge for any country.”

Negative transfer of discourse

A discourse is “a whole series of continuous speech segments or sentences”. The semantics of the organic components of a complete text is coherent, so there must be some logical connection between the sentences that make up the text. The coherence and cohesion of a text are important guarantees for the text. Only sentences with semantic coherence and some cohesion can express logical thought and complete message. However, due to the differences in organizational structure between English and Chinese, the coherence and cohesion of the two languages are also different. In order to achieve an organic connection among sentences, the related words or sentences are indispensable for the logical connection between sentences. The main problems are as follows:

(1) In terms of textual structure: the organization and expansion of English texts are characterized by a straightforward beginning and a prominent and distinct level. The textual structure and development of Chinese language usually lay emphasis on tactful using of euphemism and loose structure. Students often do not focus on English writing. Most of their passages are short of subject sentences. At the beginning, there is no clear point of view. Meanwhile, a considerable number of students like to write or end a passage with questions. For example, some students write: Several measures can be taken to solve this problem. At the end of the paragraph: Do you think this is a good way? Or using imperative sentences: Let’s do it! These are Chinese style compositions, not in conformity with the habit of English writing, will make English speakers feel unintelligible.

(2)In terms of rhetorical devices: Chinese people prefer to use a large number of gorgeous words, figures of rhetoric, famous quotes and adage to increase the weight of the article. The common sentences are: "Every road leads to Rome.", "Knowledge is power." and so on, while British and American culture worships its own words. To express ideas, they generally dislike using too many clichés, emphasizing the use of facts, and holding the view that articles with well-known sentences are negative transfer of methods in writing lacking personality, imagination and creativity.

In addition, the appearance of many simple and boring sentences in the composition is attributed to the empty content of the article, and the lack of coherence and cohesion, and transitional words. Teachers attach great importance to the language knowledge of mechanical teaching, only teaching students some common rules of grammar, phrases, sentence patterns and writing forms, but ignoring the cultivation of ability in language thinking, which results some students just lay sentences with correct grammar into text and ignore the meaning of the full text. The problem can be obviously found in the Grade seven students. Through survey, when these students enter into ninth grade, the situation is still not improved.

3.2.2 Grammar

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