An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Xu-argument Based Iterative Continuation Task On English Writing Coherence Of Senior High School Students

The National English Curriculum Standards for High School(2017)requires on language skills that students should be able to apply the language knowledge and culture behind to produce new articles in different forms like oral or written form based on different communication purposes and interlocutors.However,the long-term exam-oriented education has gradually marginalized writing teaching,which makes students ignore the communicative function of writing,leading to unsatisfactory writing performance.Coherence,as an important criterion to measure writing quality,is also a difficult point for teachers to teach and students to learn.Based on the Interactive Alignment Theory and Input-Output Theory,professor Wang Chuming proposed the reading-writing integrated task,which provided specific guidance for foreign language writing teaching.In order to enhance the interaction between learners and reading materials,Wang Chuming further proposed Iterative Continuation,there are two-round continuation and novel continuation.This experiment adopts two-round continuation writing.The basic steps are as follows.First,the teacher selects a foreign language story which is interesting in plot and suitable for students’ reading level.Then,the teacher divides the story into three sections.After fully understanding the contents of the first section,the students begin to continue writing the first section,and then the teacher presents the contents of the second section for students to find out the difference between the source text and students’ works,and then repeat the procedures until the continuation task is completed.Two-round continuation encourages students to further imitate the coherence of the source text,produce leveling effect,and exert its learning promotion effect.Therefore,by combining the previous research results and experiences,this study tries to explore the effect of iterative continuation on the local coherence and global coherence of senior high school learners’ writing by using experimental methods and interviews.This is an experimental study.The subjects of this study are 81 students from two parallel classes in Grade One of a high school in Hengshui,Hebei Province.The author selected one class as the experimental class randomly,in which the biweekly iterative continuation was applied,and the other class as the control class applied the product approach.The compositions were analyzed by the text analysis software Coh-Metrix and the teacher’s manual scoring,and then the data was statistically analyzed by the Independent-Samples T Test of SPSS23.0.Combined with the interview results,the following findings are obtained: Iterative continuation plays a positive role in improving the local coherence of students’ writing.They have made progress in vocabulary selection,deformation and repetition,the use of synonyms and hyponyms,and the use of conjunctions.Meanwhile,students also consider the semantic connection between sentences,thus improving the local coherence of texts.Besides,iterative continuation plays a positive role in improving the global coherence of students’ writing.Specifically,students will pay more attention to the overall structure of the text in their writing.In the process of reading back the source text,they will clarify theme and the structure,pay attention to the rationality of the content,and strengthen the semantic connection of the article from the whole.