| English writing is one of the basic skills that high school students should build up and it is also an important standard for measuring students’ English proficiency.In the process of language learning,reading and writing are independent and supplementary each other.However,under the pressure of exam-oriented education,English teachers of senior high school tend to ignore the relationship between reading and writing which separates input from output.That causes the problem of separation of reading and writing.On the basis of the second language acquisition theory,Professor Wang Chuming(2012)proposed continuation task in English writing,which attracted the attention of many language researchers and accelerated the application to class.The General Senior High School English Curriculum Standard(2020)also put forward the writing form of story continuation in testing suggestions of the college entrance examination.It requires candidates to read short narrative essays and then continue to write stories based on the logic of writing.In addition,linguistic complexity is one of the important indicators to measure the development of second language writing ability.At present,empirical research on the effect of continuation task on linguistic complexity is relatively rare.Based on input theory,output theory and interaction theory,this paper aims to study the influence of the continuation task on the development of the linguistic complexity of English writing for high school students.The author conducted the teaching experiment by means of quantitative study in two parallel classes with 100 students from the first grade of Xinyang Senior High School.The teacher applied continuation task in the experimental class(EC)and adopted the traditional topic writing method in the control class(CC).Through teaching experiment,this research discussed the following questions:(1)What is the impact of continuation task on the lexical complexity of high school students’ English writing?(2)What is the impact of continuation task on the syntactic complexity of high school students’ English writing?(3)How does continuation task influence the English writing performance of high school students? After the experiment,the author imported students’ compositions into the complexity analyzer for detection.Finally,SPSS 22.0 was used to analyze the obtained complexity data and scores.The three major findings are as follows.(1)Continuation task which has a significant impact on the lexical density,lexical sophistication and lexical variation of high school students’ writing can promote the development of lexical complexity.(2)Continuation task has no remarkable effect on the development of the syntactic complexity of high school students’ English writing.Among the nine syntactic indicators selected in this thesis,there are significant differences in C/T and CN/T.(3)Continuation task could effectively promote English writing performance.Finally,the author put forward enlightenment for the application of continuation task.Teachers need to pay attention to the interest of reading materials and emphasize the use of language structures in articles.It is important to cultivate students’ good habit of reading after class. |
