Abstract

This article focuses on if Chinese middle school students of English proficiency level 4 can improve their performance of passage retelling by learning passages with topics they are interested in. It is based on an empirical study by means of a 16-week comparative experiment carried out in two Chinese EFL classrooms. There are two groups that are experimental group and control group respectively. The experimental group was required to do post-task, that is, to retell passage with high topic interest, while control group was required to retell passages with comparatively low topic interest. The degrees of topic interest from high to low are ranked by students themselves.

Keywords: topic interest; retelling; middle school students; effect

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction1

1.1 The Relationship between Interest and Students1

1.2 The Relationship between the Ability of Retelling and Students 3

1.2.1 The Importance of the Ability to Retell to Students3

1.2.2 The Factors influencing the Retell Performance4

1.2.3 The Difficulty of Retelling for Students6

2. Literature Review7

3. The study9

3.1 The Participants9

3.2 Materials10

3.2 Assessment10

3.2 Procedure11

4. Results 13

4.1 Quantitative Results13

4.1.1 Statistical Model13

4.1.2 Results13

4.1 Qualitative Results15

4.1.1 Results15

5. Discussion and Conclusion 16

6. Limitation 17

References18

Appendix19