Focus on college entrance examination review and preparation strategies.
Reading and writing is a new type of English question in the college entrance examination, which first appeared in the Zhejiang college entrance examination in 2017. Students are required to read a narrative of about 320 words, and then supplement the two paragraphs of about 150 words according to the content of the text and the first sentence of the two paragraphs given in the title, so as to make it a short essay with a logical connection to the given material, with a complete plot and structure.
Reading and Writing is a new type of college entrance examination question that tests students' four abilities: the ability to grasp the key information and language characteristics of a short text, the accuracy and richness of language use, the ability to grasp the structure of a discourse, and the ability to think creatively. This requires English teachers to develop effective teaching strategies around these four key competencies, and guide students to write stories with highly synergistic plots in vivid language that meets the characteristics of narratives.
The characteristics and evaluation dimensions of the reading and writing question type.
The evaluation dimensions of the college entrance examination reading and writing question type can be summarized into three aspects: content, language, and fluency. The evaluation of the content mainly focuses on the relevance, richness, synergy, and values of the original theme. The evaluation of language focuses on the accuracy, richness and appropriateness of the language. The evaluation of fluency focuses on whether the cohesion, semantic logic and text structure are accurate and reasonable.
For the evaluation of reading and writing, the synergy in the content dimension is not found in other question types, which is mainly reflected in the cohesiveness, rationality, completeness and innovation of the continued content. Among them, the cohesion is mainly reflected in the connection with the content of the original text and the two first sentences given by the title, and the rationality should be achieved from four aspects: plot, characters, culture and language style.
How to write a plot with a high degree of synergy.
In order to write a plot with a high degree of synergy, students should grasp the following four points:
First of all, it is necessary to understand the storyline by reading the article and find out the foreshadowing. The reading texts provided by Reading Post Writing are mainly narrative texts. To grasp the context of a narrative, we can start from the six elements of the narrative, that is, to sort out the time, place, people, and causes, processes, and results of events. Teachers should sort out the six elements of narrative in their daily teaching, use the "story mountain" map method to train students' ability to sort out the plot of the story, and find out the unusual points in the plot, that is, "foreshadowing", which is the "conflict" that needs to be resolved when continuing.
Second, make a list of the main characters and summarize the character traits. A character's personality traits determine what they do, including their actions, words, reactions to something, etc. In order to make the continued plot highly synergistic, it is necessary to ensure that the continued plot conforms to the "character design" of the characters, so it is necessary to understand the characteristics of the characters from between the lines of the original text, and the continued plot should conform to these characteristics of the characters, so that the continued plot tends to be reasonable and the synergy will be higher.
Secondly, pay attention to the personage of the article to ensure the consistency of the main character, the theme, and the perspective. There are main characters and secondary characters in the story, and in addition to highlighting the protagonist and focusing on the development of the main characters, the continuation of the plot should also pay attention to the narrator's person, perspective, and whether the sublimation of the topic at the end of the text deviates from the theme of the article. For example, the reading and writing questions in the 2022 College Entrance Examination English New College Entrance Examination Volume I, although narrated in the first person, it should focus on the good qualities of the protagonist David, and the "I" in the text is just a "narrative tool man", and the protagonist to be described in ink should be David. Candidates should distinguish between priorities and understand where the pen and ink should be used when continuing to write.
Finally, the two first sentences provided should be carefully read to finalize the specifics of each paragraph. Although reading and writing is an open-ended composition, the continuation cannot be played at will, and must not only be coordinated with the original text, but also guided and limited by the first sentence of the two paragraphs provided by the title. Students should imagine what will happen next based on the first paragraph first, guess what happened before based on the first paragraph of the second paragraph, and think about what will happen next. Sorting out the plot of the article, finding "foreshadowing", and summarizing the characteristics of the characters is the process of opening the mind, and reading the first sentence of the given paragraph is the process of sorting out the thinking and narrowing the scope of the plot.
How to grasp the characteristics of language and accumulate language.
From the perspective of language expression, the score of the essays written after reading is divided into five grades from low to high, and the composition of each grade presents the following characteristics: the first grade of the essay only has the relevant words of the partition, and there is no coherence at all. The second level of composition, at first glance, can be divided into paragraphs, basically can express the main meaning, but the sense of sentence structure is very weak, most of them are incomplete sentences, lack of basic sentence components such as subject-verb-object, or the word is misspelled, and its meaning cannot be accurately understood, or the correct spelling of the word is written in large lengths, and there is a basic sentence structure but the meaning of the expression is not clear. In the third level of composition, basically every sentence has a sense of sentence structure, but the part of speech is confused, and most of the predicates have errors (such as be + verbs, adjectives or nouns are directly used as predicates, etc.). In the fourth level of composition, each sentence is expressed completely, but there are errors in the predicate (tense, voice, collocation, etc.), the sentence structure and diction are too simple, or there are mistakes when trying to use complex structures. The fifth-level composition is rich and diverse, with a few language errors (spelling, prepositional collocation, parts of speech, etc.), or there are no language errors but the language is too exaggerated and not appropriate enough.
According to the stylistic characteristics of narratives, the language used in reading and writing can be divided into narrative, descriptive, inductive and transitional language. Among them, narrative language is used to drive the plot, reveal the background and the result, that is, "tell".Descriptive language is used to express the characteristics of the character and the theme of the article, that is, "show". Descriptive language can be further subdivided into action, language, appearance, psychology and environmental descriptions. Generally speaking, the description of appearance, psychology and environment should be small and precise, and it can be used to assist in decoration.
There is a time limit on the number of words in the essay in the examination room, and the language description, especially the dialogue description, should not be too much. The description of the movements is the focus, and this part covers many aspects such as the hands, feet, head, and whole body. The description of facial expressions is another important point, which can be accumulated from two perspectives, one is to correspond to various emotions, that is, joy, anger, sorrow, and sorrow;The second is to express it according to the body organs, such as eyes, nose, mouth, etc.
In short, reading and writing is not only an effective test tool, but also an effective way to promote foreign language learning. Correctly understanding and applying the teaching method of reading and writing plays a very important role in improving students' English writing skills and presentation skills. After using the above strategies and methods to guide students for a period of time, students can not only see their own progress in language use, but also improve their self-expression and creative thinking.
Author: Wang Huishan is the deputy director of the Academic Affairs Office of Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School).