Writing teaching is an important part of English teaching in senior high schools. It should run through the whole process of English teaching, always accompanied by the teaching of language knowledge such as dialogue, text, vocabulary and grammar. The new English curriculum standard for senior high school puts forward new requirements for writing: writing should reflect students' ability to use various languages. The college entrance examination instructions also require students to write an English composition of about 100 words according to the tips given, which requires coherence in content, fluency in arts and sciences, and no serious grammatical or structural errors. Combined with years of English teaching experience, the author summarizes the following points.
First, the problems of students' written English expression
1. Poor writing foundation. Students feel that the most prominent problems in English writing are lack of vocabulary, poor ability to choose words and make sentences and inability to write good sentences. There are also many mistakes in written sentences, such as: spelling mistakes, unclear vocabulary recognition, improper collocation, gilding the lily; The format of English practical writing is not clear, some candidates can't use the format of letters or diaries correctly, and copy the format of Chinese letters stiffly, resulting in low-level mistakes; When the word order is reversed and multiple modifiers modify a head word, the word order is chaotic, the real subject is unclear, and the basic English syntax is not understood; Verb tense error is one of the most common mistakes in students' written expression, and it is also one of the obvious signs that students' language use ability is the worst.
2. The writing content is vague. For example, 68% of the students have nothing to say about the content of the composition, and most of the compositions are just a few sentences, and the sentences are incomplete and the meaning is unclear; Single content, even wrong expression; The words are plain, pale and weak; The trace of mother tongue is quite obvious, and many candidates do not pay attention to the usual accumulation, and the sentences written are obviously Chinglish.
3. Writing skills are unfamiliar. For example, 64% students don't think about the topic before writing, and often write one sentence if they want, patchwork and incoherent; Ignore the cohesion of the sentence before and after, the problem is unclear, and the paragraphs are not divided; Less than 10% of the articles are revised after writing, and I don't know how to modify them, resulting in obvious or low-level errors; The lack of cohesion between sentences leads to unstable meaning conversion.
4. Physically and psychologically. High school students are relatively mature, and the English they can use is a large number of words and good meanings in English written expression, but the language form they use is unsatisfactory and full of mistakes; 75% students are afraid of the writing task assigned by the teacher, and only like 10%, so they are afraid of difficulties and lack confidence. Students feel that writing is time-consuming and slow, which affects the motivation of effective writing training.
Second, effective measures to improve the ability of written expression
1. Cultivate students' interest in learning writing. Since junior high school, students have been psychologically afraid of translation and writing. How to help students overcome their lack of self-confidence and fear of difficulties and cultivate their interest in writing is very important. On the one hand, we should make them understand the importance and function of English writing; On the other hand, let students understand that there are many forms of essay writing. Post students' excellent papers after writing class, cultivate students' interest in learning English writing in praise and affirmation, and make students happy to write. Only in this way can writing training get twice the result with half the effort.
2. Guide students to develop good language acquisition habits. Written expression pays attention to students' comprehensive ability to use language, which has been effective since the first year of high school. Therefore, in addition to a large number of words, sentences and paragraphs training, the following methods should be adopted to cultivate students' language sense and written writing ability.
(1) Recite the main paragraphs and paragraphs with more phrases and sentence patterns in the reading text. Doing so can help students understand the text, memorize important phrases and sentence patterns, accumulate topic writing content and cultivate a sense of language.
(2) Accumulate phrase vocabulary. Vocabulary is the necessary material for speaking and writing. Teachers can print the important phrases and sentence patterns of each module of the new textbook into a book for students to copy and recite, so as to improve their vocabulary for a long time.
(3) Collect the format and text structure of various questions in English writing, collect the beautiful sentence patterns at the beginning and end commonly used, and recite excellent sentences.
(4) Special writing training combined with a series of writing exercises allows students to learn independently, cultivate students' writing ability and put it into practice after class. (5) Insist on the practice of multi-translation of one sentence. In vocabulary teaching, we should insist on explaining new words in English, pay attention to the accumulation of synonyms, develop students' divergent thinking, and adhere to the practice of multi-purpose with one meaning.
(6) limited training, concentration, in one go. It is difficult to finish, revise, finalize and copy in a limited time, usually 20 minutes. Therefore, we should pay attention to limited training, form good habits, and always remind students to be good at avoiding students and being familiar with them, but avoid Chinglish and think in English.
Third, carefully organize students' teaching to improve their English writing ability.
In the usual marking work, we found that the articles that the marking teacher likes are generally neat in font, neat in volume, closely related to the theme, clear in organization, authentic in language, natural in transition, moderate in length and in one go, while the articles that he hates are generally unclear in level, unclear in paragraphs, unreasonable in sentences, chaotic, scrawled and unclear in volume. The new curriculum standard also clearly points out that the basic skills of writing are: sorting out ideas, organizing materials, planning structure, listing outlines, drafting articles, organizing languages, choosing words and making sentences, modifying articles, and correctly using punctuation marks and letters. In teaching, teachers can design and apply a series of teaching activities according to the teaching content to improve students' writing ability. The following is the "five-step composition method" mode used by the author in specific teaching practice.
The first step: review the concept of the topic and make clear the genre and format.
In the usual writing training, let students know several common styles and formats. Teachers should combine the classification of texts, summarize and introduce them in detail according to the subject matter, and guide students to master the writing characteristics and formats of various styles.
The second step is to grasp the main points and correspond them one by one.
Complete score is the key to high score, and points will be deducted if there is no score. Generally, 5-8 points plus some minor points make up an article, so it can be listed in the form of an outline or keywords to avoid omission.
The third step is to choose words and make sentences and use more sentences.
Judging from NMET's English model essays in recent years, an article usually consists of 8- 10 sentences. Therefore, using more phrases and common English sentence patterns is the key to writing excellent sentences. In the middle school stage, we should first carry out intensive training on five basic sentence patterns, such as simple sentences and Therebe sentence patterns, and then carry out appropriate training on complex sentences and complex sentences, so that students can acquire solid basic knowledge of sentence structure, thus laying a solid foundation for rapidly improving students' written expression ability. In addition, the use of phrase vocabulary can also improve the writing level. Therefore, we should pay attention to the accumulation of some phrases and example sentences and the translation of a meaning.
The fourth step is to select conjunctions and write them in words.
Writing is not only the accumulation of sentences, but also the coherence and logic of articles. The cohesion of the article is naturally compact, and the key is to use conjunctions well. In the usual teaching, teachers should let students choose appropriate conjunctions in a reasonable order or according to certain writing clues, and connect sentences into a string, so that each sentence can be connected into a short article with compact structure, clear hierarchy and coherent semantics.
The fifth step is to check and modify and copy neatly.
After writing the article, read it carefully and check the spelling and punctuation errors, grammatical errors and logical errors in the article; Check whether the number of words meets the requirements; Check whether the main points of the content are complete and simplified, so as to make the expression more refined, the wording more appropriate and reduce low-level errors; After the manuscript is finalized, copy it carefully to ensure that the handwriting is standardized, correct and beautiful, and keep the surface clean and tidy.
In a word, with the improvement of the new curriculum standard and college entrance examination scoring standard in recent years, new and higher requirements have been put forward for students' written expression ability. If teachers pay attention to the problems existing in usual training, constantly improve teaching methods, cultivate students' good learning methods and language habits, strengthen the guidance of writing skills, and cooperate with effective classroom training mode, students will certainly accumulate wealth and write excellent works with fluent writing and literary talent.
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