Effect Of The Continuation Task On EFL Writing In Junior High School

According to English Curriculum Standard(2018),language skills are an important part of language proficiency,and language skills include listening,speaking,reading,writing and viewing,and writing as an productive skill is an important language skill for middle school students.It is also a difficult point in middle school English teaching.The reasons for most students afraid of writing are: insufficient vocabulary,irregular language expression,disordered tense and illogical writing structure.Recently,in foreign language teaching,students' writing dilemma needs to be solved.Professor Wang Chuming(2010)put forward the continuation task method,which opens up a new way of thinking for English teachers.This method embodies the principle of “contents creation,language imitation”,“language imitation” focuses on students' language ability and learning ability,and “contents creation” focuses on students' thinking ability and cultural ability.Under such circumstances,this research endeavors to develop the continuation task and aims to solve the following two questions: 1.Can the effect of the continuation task improve students' writing achievement on the aspects of language,organization,and content? 2.Can the effect of the continuation task enhance students' interest in English writing?In this study,the participants are from two parallel classes of grade three from No.3 Junior High School in Qingyang District.The two classes are selected as the experiment class and the control class respectively.The experiment class adopts the continuation task while the control class adopts the topic writing method.The experiment lasts for eight weeks.The results are as follows: on the one hand,through the analysis of the pretest and posttest's scores with SPSS21.0,the continuation task method is superior to the topic writing method from the perspective of training students' writing ability.Specifically,its effect of the continuation task is outstanding in the language,organization and content of the students' composition.Before writing,they can pay attention to the accumulation of vocabulary and sentence structure from the reading materials provided,and the continuation is consistent with the coherence and logic of the previous text.On the other hand,through the questionnaires and interview,the effect of the continuation task can enhance students' interest in English writing.Students think that the continuation task can renew their confidence in English writing,and stimulate their creative enthusiasm.Compared with the topic writing method,the open story can release students' writing pressure.Hence,this research holds that the continuation task is indeed an efficient English writing method worth popularizing.Due to objective factors,there are limitations in this research: firstly,the experiment time and sample quantity are not enough;secondly,in the continuation task,there is subjectivity in choosing the reading materials;thirdly,the scoring criteria of the continuation task mainly give priority to the three aspects of language,organization and content.Therefore,it is suggested that researchers can overcome the above limitations and improve the research results in the future relevant research.