A Study Of The Application Of Continuation Task To High School English Writing Teaching

As a kind of comprehensive language competence,writing not only measures students' linguistic proficiency,but also cultivates students' competence in logical thinking.In the current traditional English writing teaching,teachers lay more emphasis on vocabulary,grammar teaching,and neglect the relationship between language input and output,and students gradually lose their interest and confidence.Moreover,it has been found that the performance of students' lexical use,syntactic patterns and coherence in high schools is far from satisfactory through analyzing students' English essays.For a long time,cultivating students' English writing interests and improving their writing ability has been the direction in English writing teaching.Wang Churning(2012)has proposed continuation task on the basis of second language acquisition theory.Many empirical studies have demonstrated that alignment effect occurs in continuation task which is an effective way to improve English writing.Tightly coupling comprehension with production can trigger alignment effect in language learning.The closer input and output of language combined,the more learning effect will be produced.Applying continuation task is to narrow the gap between language input and output,and provides a new perspective in high school English writing teaching.This study attempts to apply continuation task to verify its effectiveness in high school English writing teaching.The research selects students from two classes in Grade Two of a senior high school for an eight-week experiment.Both of the English-version and Chinese-version of the material served as the input for participants in the experiment class and the control class to finish the stories with their endings removed in English.The research adopts pre-test,post-test,questionnaire and interview as instrument and then collects students' written productions in the post-test and analyzes their writing essays through Coh-Metrix 3.0 and SPSS.Results of this study indicate:this pedagogy has a positive influence on students' lexical use,syntactic patterns and coherence;students have changed their attitudes for the better,and their English writing scores have improved.Thus,it verifies the practicability of continuation task in high school English writing teaching.Furthermore,continuation task can help learners write creatively,ease writing stress and foster a sense of achievement.At last,this study provides some suggestions for future high school English writing teaching.