An Empirical Study On The Continuation Task In High School English Writing Instruction

As one of the basic language skills,writing plays an important role to measure learners’ comprehensive proficiency.In spite of its significance,writing still is a weak point in English instruction of high school.It is a critical issue for English teachers to improve students’ writing competence effectively.Although a lot of English teachers contribute to exploring applicable methods to enhance their writing ability,the present situation is not so satisfying.Facing such a situation,Professor Wang Chuming puts forward a new term named the continuation task,aiming at enhancing students’ writing competence by means of continuing the ending of an unfinished text.Following his theoretical and practical guidance,the empirical study is intended to apply the continuation task method to high school English writing instruction to facilitate students’ writing competence.Based on Krashen’s input hypothesis,Swains’ s output hypothesis and the alignment effect,the experiment is to investigate the effects of the continuation task on English writing teaching in two aspects.1)What are the teaching strategies of the continuation task in high school writing instruction? 2)What are the effects of continuation task method on students’ writing performance?The participants of the study are 196 students from two parallel science classes of Senior 2 in Dongyong middle school.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied in the study with the instruments of two writing tests,two questionnaires and Jacob’s ESL Composition Profile.Before and after the employment of the continuation task,writing tests and questionnaires are given,serving as pre-test and post-test as well as pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire.After 14 weeks’ experiment,the post-test and post-questionnaire are carried out to collect data.The data analysis contains double scoring,calculation and comparison.The research results are as follows.Firstly,continuation task method has a great effect on enhancing high school students’ writing performance.The means of EG in the two writing tests rise from 67.56 to 77.64 and the P-value is.02.Secondly,withthe help of Jacob’s ESL composition assessment,it can be seen distinctly that EG has made great progresses in the aspects of content,organization,language use and vocabulary.Thirdly,by comparison of the two questionnaires,it is concluded that students have a positive attitude toward the continuation task method in terms of students’ entire feelings on English writing,their satisfaction degree to English writing instruction;difficulties met in writing English compositions and writing strategies.There are some valuable findings as follows.Firstly,the continuation task method is effective to improve students’ writing competence.Secondly,teachers ought to choose appropriate reading materials for the continuation task teaching.Thirdly,to achieve high-quality learning and language production,teachers should focus on the writing feedback.Fourthly,teachers should balance instruction and practice.Fifthly,brainstorming is a helpful technique in writing that can makes students think the topic with a wide open mind.Last but not least,teachers need to help students to enjoy the process of reading.