A Study Of The Effects Of The Continuation Task On English Writing Self-efficacy And Writing Quality Of Senior High School Students

Writing is a comprehensive application of language and a comprehensive test of English learning.In the past years,problems in learners' writing has been recognized(Wen Qiufang,Guo Chunjie,1998,Zhang Yuanyuan,2011,Zhang Xiaopeng,2016),and many methods has been proposed by researchers and teachers to improve students' writing ability.The continuation task is one of the methods of writing combined with reading comprehension(Wang Chuming,2012).With its advantages in the combination of the two skills,it has been applied and researched quite often in English classroom in college.As a continuation of such effort,this study intends to carry out an experiment and to explore the effect of the continuation task on senior high school students' writing,specifically in their writing self-efficacy and writing performance.It aims to answer the following two questions:1)What is the effect of the continuation task on junior high school students' writing self-efficacy?2)What is the effect of the continuation task on junior high school students' writing performance in the aspects of content,structure,vocabulary,language and writing norms?The study was set in a middle school in Shangrao district of Jiangxi Province in China.One hundred sixteen students participated in the experiment and they fell into two groups,the control group(59)and experimental group(57).Conventional way of teaching English writing was taught in the control group,while the continuation task was employed in the experimental group.The instruments used in the experiment included two questionnaires and pre-and post-test writing tasks.Besides,interviews were conducted among students in the experiment group.After the 14-week experiment,the study reached the following conclusions: 1)The continuation task improves students' writing self-efficacy in both dimensions of writing task self-efficacy and writing skill self-efficacy.2)The continuation task also has a significant positive influence on students' writing in terms of language,vocabulary,and content.On the other hand,in the structure and writing norms,there is no significant improvement after the experiment of continuation task.Results of the present study indicate as a writing teaching method,the continuation task can be not only conductive to students' writing ability,but also beneficial in improving students' writing self-efficacy.Hence,teachers should make full use of combining reading and writing when teaching writing.