The Application Of The Continuation Task In Senior High School English Writing Teaching

English writing is a process of students' comprehensive use of language knowledge,and it is also an extremely important part of English teaching.In senior high school English writing teaching,although many teachers put a lot of energy into it,the present situation of senior high school English composition is still not optimistic.Therefore,combined with the actual situation of foreign language teaching in China,Wang Chuming(2012)proposed the continuation task to improve the writing ability of learners through combining reading and writing.It gives learners a reading material without the endings and then asks learners to continue writing and complete the content according to the material.The purpose of this study is to improve students' writing achievements,reduce students' linguistic and semantic errors in writing texts by continuation task and investigate the evaluations of the students of continuation task.Based on the theories of input and output hypothesis and alignment effect,this study attempts to answer three research questions by using experimental research and questionnaire survey:(1)What is the effect of continuation task on senior high school students' English writing achievements?(2)What is the effect of continuation task on the linguistic and semantic errors in students' writings?(3)What is the students' evaluation of continuation task?In this study,students from two parallel classes in Senior Two of X Senior High School in Yining City are taken as the research subjects,and the continuation task is applied to English writing in senior high school.The teaching experiment lasted for 12 weeks.In the experimental class,the continuation task is used for writing teaching,and the control class uses conventional teaching method for writing teaching..After the experiment,the author uses SPSS 19.0 to analyze the experimental results and discuss the research questions.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Continuation task can improve students' writing achievements.Before the experiment,there was no significant difference(p=.689>0.05)between the average scores of the pretest of the CC(13.925)and the EC(14.109);after the experiment,the average scores of the post-test of the EC(18.746)were higher than that of the CC(14.359),there was significant difference(p=.000<0.05).At the same time,the post-test scores of the EC were higher than the pretest scores.(2)As for the linguistic errors,continuation task can significantly reduce the three types of errors: number agreement(p=.000<0.05),non-finite verbs(p=.000<0.05),tense(p=.000<0.05),in which article(p=.612>0.05)and copula(p=.410>0.05)had no significant difference before and after experiment;for the semantic errors,that is,Chinglish(p=.794>0.05),there was no significant difference before and after the experiment.(3)Students had positive evaluation and attitude ofcontinuation task and continuation task can improve students' interest and confidence in writing.According to the results of the questionnaires,students like the application of continuation task in English writing.Most students think that the continuation task stimulates their expression desire and imagination.And they begin to pay attention to the standardized use of vocabulary and grammar,sentence cohesion and article structure in writing,and start to focus on the relationship between reading and writing.The enlightenment obtained through this study has the following five points: First,teachers should pay attention to the relationship between reading and writing,and should not separate reading from writing in the writing teaching.Secondly,teachers should focus on developing students' thinking ability.Finally,teachers should give students timely and effective feedback.