An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Iterative Continuation On Lexical Richness Of English Writing In Senior High School

Vocabulary functions as an important foundation in an article.To some extent,the amount of vocabulary and the ability of lexical use reflect the quality of a composition and students’ proficiency level further.And many senior high school students tend to use single words in their compositions having difficulty in turning receptive words into productive words at this stage.So it is urgent and necessary for researchers and teachers to find ways in order to improve lexical richness in students’ writing.Wang Chuming first proposed continuation task to improve second language learning in 2012.And then in order to strengthen the interaction,he made further efforts putting forward iterative continuation.In these years,many researchers pay great attention to the application of continuation exploring its alignment effect and influencing factors.However,the researches about the effect of continuation task on vocabulary especially lexical richness are limited.Because of this current situation,the present study focuses on the effects of iterative continuation on lexical richness in students’ English compositions.Based on Read’s classification,lexical richness can be divided into lexical variation,lexical sophistication,lexical density and lexical error.And different proficiency students have different lexical richness’ s features in their compositions.So in order to be specific,the study tries to figure out the effect of iterative continuation on lexical richness of different English level students’ writings on the four dimensions.Then the questions are :(1)What are the effects of iterative continuation on lexical variation of students at different English levels in their English writings?(2)What are the effects of iterative continuation on lexical sophistication of students at different English levels in their English writings?(3)What are the effects of iterative continuation on lexical density of students at different English levels in their English writings?(4)What are the effects of iterative continuation on lexical error of students at different English levels in their English writings?To answer the above four questions,there were altogether 120 Grade 10 students from a senior high school in Hebei province participating in this experiment,among whom,30 students belonged to high English level students,60 students were part of middle English level students and the rest of 30 students were low English level students.All of them received the same training.Before the experiment,the test from university entrance examination in 2018 was given to students in order to investigate lexical richness of the compositions.Then they did a six-round iterative continuation during the experiment.After the experiment,the test from university entrance examination in 2019 was distributed to students as well to check whether the iterative continuation had effects on lexical richness of students at different English levels in their English writings.The results analyzed by SPSS 22.0 revealed that iterative continuation had different effects on lexical richness of students’ compositions based on different English proficiency levels.On the part of lexical variation,iterative continuation showed significant effects on high and middle English level students’ writings but not on low English level students’ writings.In terms of lexical sophistication,iterative continuation had great influences on high English level student’ writings but not on middle and low English level students’ writings.In the aspect of lexical density,iterative continuation had no improvement on lexical density of students at three different English levels in their writings.In the matter of lexical error,iterative continuation had significant impacts on high and low English level students’ writings but not on middle English level students’ writings.Having found that iterative continuation had effects on lexical richness of students’ writings with different English proficiency,this study gave some implications on English teaching.First,teachers could assign iterative continuation task to students helping them accumulate and employ more language knowledge.Second,teachers could use iterative continuation as a teaching tool in vocabulary.Third,teachers could consider different proficiency levels’ students when applying iterative continuation.At last,limitations of the study and some suggestions for future researches were mentioned.