Effects Of Continuation Task On High School Students’ Writing Content,and Language Use In Argumentative Writing

Recent studies on continuation task have mainly focused on how continuation spurs the development of linguistic accuracy,fluency and complexity;some studied whether the reading materials’ attractiveness and lexical difficulty would have any impact on the result of students’ writing,and alignment effects of reading materials in Chinese or English.Studies in this line often adopted incomplete narratives with college English majors or non-English college students as participants.However,few studies have adopted comparative argumentative essays with complete content to probe into effects of the continuation task in the high-school students’ writing.The present study is therefore motivated to use comparative argumentative essays to explore whether and how the continuation task could enhance high-school students’ language production and writing achievement.The present study required participants to fulfill ten essays within 14 weeks and take two tests.The participants included a control group of 52 students plus 100 students divided into two experimental groups,the English-English group and the Chinese-English group.The English-English group wrote 10 English essays after reading 10 English argumentative articles,while the Chinese-English group wrote the same number of English articles after reading the Chinese versions of the reading materials.All three groups took part in pretest and post-test.Two teachers assigned scores to students’ essays according to the length of their essays,language use,argumentative points,supportive evidence and argumentative process.Scores of the two experimental groups were then compared and analyzed.Readability Analyzer,a tool designed to extract basic readability statistics of English texts,was used to analyze the lexical use of students’ essays collected from the 10 essays,after which 4 measures,that is,Average Sentence Length,Average Word Length,Word Type,and Word Standard Type Token Ratio,were chosen to compare the differences of the argumentative essays written by the two experimental groups.L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer was used to analyze syntactic complexity of the students’ 10 essays,after which 6 measures,that is,Words per T unit,Words per clause,T-unit complexity ratio,Dependent clause ratio,Complex nominals per T-unit,and Verb phrases per T-unit,were chosen to analyze the differences between the the English-English group and the Chinese-English group.With writing scores of the controlled group collected from the twotests,the writing performance of the two experimental groups were compared and analyzed.This comparison revealed that students in the English-English group who completed the continuation task identified more persuasive perspectives,provided more sufficient evidence and carried out stricter argument processes.And with the help of a complete argumentative structure and process provided by the reading material,the English-English group exhibited the ability to imitate former content and then accomplish their own argumentative writing.Second,the continuation task could improve the students’ language production,that is,with the help of the reading materials,students can use richer vocabulary to write longer T units and use more clauses,dependent clauses and complex nominals as well as verb phrases to state their own points of view in the writing tasks.Third,the continuation task could significantly promote the students’ writing achievement on argumentative writing tasks.These findings confirmed that continuation was a practical and efficient task that contributed to a marked promotion of Chinese high-school students’ English writing proficiency with a complete argumentative structure and persuasive process and to a high efficiency of language use.