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2.1 The Definitions of Retelling Retellingis a procedure in which students can reconstruct stories or texts. The definitionof retelling in the English-Chinese dictionary is “totell a story again, often in a different way”(A. S. Hornby, ed: Shi Xiaoshu,Trans: 2004). It is also defined as that “Retelling means students use theirown words to refine or imitate an article or text based on their understandingof it. It is quite different from reciting or repeating some key sentences fromthe text, and also different from or by far more than remembering some key ordetailed plots”(net.1). “Retelling is not the same as reciting. Learners arenot only required to be familiar with the text, but also need to reorganize thetext from different points of views after they have digested the text, and thenexpress an article by using their own words”(Li Jun，2002：1). copyright paper51.com 2.2 The Studies and Theories of Retelling copyright paper51.com Numerousstudies have been done to support the use of retelling as a comprehension meansand an effective way of improving oral English. Moss (1997) studied whether allthe first graders were able to comprehend expository text through oralretellings of an international trade book. His results indicated that themajority of students were able to understand and retell expository text basedon their retellings. He also (1993) examined how well the children in grades 5comprehended expository texts, and found out that the majority of children in differentgrade levels were able to review the text after hearing it being read aloud, henceproved that retelling was an appropriate means to assess students’ comprehensionof expository texts. Morrow (1985, 1986) carried out three different studies todetermine the specific instructional benefits of story retelling. In all histhree studies, a lot of experiments had been done to show the improvement inoral English, the comprehension of the story, and the sense of story structure.Another study states that “According to retelling, students’ ideation has been cultivated,at the same time, their oral expression can be improved”(Liu Xijuan ＆ Cheng Fuhui：2000). Canadian linguistBialystok (1978:28) divided the language knowledge learnt by learners into dominantand implicit language knowledge. Dominant language knowledge includes sound,grammar, vocabulary and the like which exist in the learners’ consciousness andcan be expressed clearly. While implicit language knowledge refers to which hasbeen internalized and makes learners to speak a language fluently withoutthinking for a long time before speaking. A large amount of retelling trainingcan make students master the sterling sound, intonation, and deepen theircomprehension of grammar, improve their memorizing of vocabulary and someexpressions. Thereupon, their language accumulation increases largely and theirlanguage outputs become standard. paper51.com |