Chapter One An Introduction to the Experiment
1.1 Experiment Background
With the development of linguistics and the progress of science and technology,modern teaching methods become popular in nowadays’ English class and a lot ofschools have used network, multimedia-assisted foreign language teaching models.Recitation, however, as one of the traditional and the most effective ways to languageacquisition, has been forgotten gradually. Therefore, based on Second LanguageAcquisition theory, the experimental study on recitation as a way to improve Englishmajors' interpreting ability is taken in this thesis. The experiment lasts two monthsand the subjects are 22 English majors in the Foreign Language School, JilinUniversity. With the enhancement of the globalization, the market of interpretation in Chinabecomes larger and larger, which means the demand for high-quality interpreters isextremely urgent. However, since the students who learn English interpretation in ourcountry live in an environment which is far from the target language and through theclassroom observation by the writer and the questionnaires, the students are oftennervous and what they express always fail to convey the idea when they want toexpress. The students often cannot get away from the influence of Chinese thinking,and the choice of words and structuring of sentence are always dull stiff, evenerroneous, which will make a lot of students lose interest and confidence. Moreover,the reason why a large amount of students cannot interpret accurately, fluently withinthe given time is that they fail to develop good sense of English and lack of correctthinking way.
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1.2 Theoretical Framework
In fact, the theoretical foundation for the functions of recitation in improvingstudents’ English interpreting ability is very sound. For example, Krashen’s InputHypothesis and Ellis’s hypothesis --language input frequency is the decisive factor oflanguage acquisition. (Krashen,,1982:230)Besides, Peter Skehan also once exploredthe internal mechanism of language studying from the perspective of cognitivepsychology. (Skehan, 1996:145) He pointed out that there are two kinds of storingforms in long-term memory for language knowledge. One is rule-based analyticsystem; the other is memory -based formulaic system. The latter system contains alarge number of formulaic languages and so learners can fetch them and use themaccurately, fluently within the limited time under the pressure. Corder believes that alanguage learner’s mother tongue offers extreme abundant hypothesis about the targetlanguage. Only through a large number of target language input can the learnerminimize the interference of mother tongue and establish the target languagecognitive grammar system. Besides, according to Canadian linguist Bialystok, thereare two kinds of language learners’ language: explicit language knowledge and tacitlanguage knowledge. The latter refers to the internalization of language knowledge, which exists in the learner's subconscious and thus the learners can use languagefluently and without thinking to form the language sense of the target language. Whatreally works is those internalized tacit language knowledge when a person is usingany language, rather than explicit language knowledge.
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Chapter Two Experiment Process
2.1 Recitation Experiment Design
This experiment lasts two months with three procedures. In this part, the authorfirst introduces experiment parameter and then introduces the whole procedure. Teacher: The teacher guiding the experiment has rich experience in interpreting andtranslation and in conducting similar experiments; therefore, he can arrange theteaching process, choose the teaching contents and methods according to the differentsituations of the students.Experiment Subjects: 21 senior English majors from the School of ForeignLanguages, Jilin University. There are 30 students in this class. In order to make thedata scientific and representative, the writer chose 21 students randomly to participatein this experiment. Experiment Period: This experiment is divided into three phases which lasted twomonths altogether.Experiment Tool: 12 copies of passages in English and Chinese. Every copycontains two passages, one in Chinese, and another in English. And every passagecontains 200-300 words. The contents of these passages cover a wide range of aspects,including politics, economic, military, culture and diplomatic and so on. In the courseof experiment, the writer will choose two copies randomly for the recitation. Thecontents for the two groups are the same. There are six tests, including 3Chinese-English interpreting tests and 3 English-Chinese tests for two groups ofstudents at different stages. The writer chooses the tests also randomly every time. Foreach test, the same passages are used for both groups to interpret for the purpose offairness.
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2.2 Data Collection and Experiment Results
Data collection is a very important part. With the help of my supervisor, this part iscompleted smoothly. Each test in the process of experiment contains the objective and reasonable criteriasuch as the reaction speed, comprehension ability, ability of expression, psychologicalquality, and stress management. Besides, it also contains the expression logicality,integrity, accuracy, fluency, clarity, grammar accuracy, and the translation of culturalconnotation. The writer employed the statistic software SPSS to analyze theexperiment data. And the results can be seen in the following Table 1 .
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Chapter Three Research Findings.......20
3.1 The Function of Recitation to Students’ Interpreting Ability .......20
3.1.1 The Comprehension of Source Language .........20
3.1.2 The Reaction Speed .......20
3.1.3 Fluency in Expression..........21
3.1.4 Interpreting Faithfulness......22
3.1.5 Confidence .........24
3.2 Recitation Effect on Students’ Motivation for Study........24
Chapter Four Limitations and Suggestions.....25
4.1 Experiment Research Limitations.......25
4.2 Suggestion For Future Research.........25
Chapter Four Limitations and Suggestions
4.1 Experiment Research Limitations
Through contrasting the post-experiment result and the pre-experiment result, theauthor reflects on the objective data of the experiments, and put forward twolimitations about experimental studies:Firstly, the author find that a few students’ interpretation results are unstable intheir experiment data. For example, the examinees perform well in the understandingof the source language in pre-experiment test, but they do worse in thepost-experiment when they encounter the content that they are not familiar with. Dueto their own English level and the familiarity of the content, so the author thinks thatmost examinees in the trials are in the different improving course of interpretingability. Besides, because of the short observation cycle, most examinees are in theperiod of stable qualitative change. However, this does not exclude that a fewexaminees in the period of unstable qualitative change.Secondly, due to recitation, the examinees’ interpretation thinking habit has beentransformed, but the author haven't been able to find more accurate quantitative wayto quantify the change, only to gain change at the macro level through the interviewfrom examinees and the teacher. And the author hope that the future study can makethe process be fully quantified.
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Conclusion
Recitation helps to improve students' ability in English interpretation. Besides,recitation plays a great role in enhancing students’ personalized learning andindependent ability. As long as recitation methods are innovated continuously,recitation will be applied much more extensively so that it can play its unique role inimproving English skills and bringing in new inspiration and benefits to teaching. Atthe same time, teachers should help students develop interest in reciting and avoidusing the wrong memorizing strategy. They should improve memorizing skills toeffectively improve the ability of English interpretation, enhance the confidence oflearning English and improve the students’ problem including "dumb English","stammer English" and "Chinglish". What’s more, we still need to explore a variety ofstudy methods to reach complementary advantages, such as the combining joint ofmultimedia means so as to achieve the best effect of teaching and learning.This empirical study results show that recitation, as a way of language input,has a significant effect in cultivating college English majors’ English interpretationability. Context missing is the biggest obstacle for Chinese English learners andrecitation, as a comprehensive and integrated study, is one of the important measuresto build and improve the learning context. And many excellent Chinese Englishlearners have used or adopted this studying strategy. Recitation has strong power andshould not be blurred in any environment at any stage of English learning.
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Reference (omitted)