An Experimental Research Of The Effects Of Continuation Task Conditions On Senior High School Students’ English Relative Clauses Learning

Since the continuation task was put forward,its facilitative effect on L2 learning has been gradually confirmed.Virtually the rationale of promoting effect lies in the interactive alignment during the process of learners’ noticing and imitation of target language form.Noticing therefore plays a significant role in language alignment.However,whether the differences in learners’ attention to English relative clauses(English RCs)will lead to the differences in the facilitative effect,still needs to be further proved.Hence,with the help of the continuation task,this study utilizes task instruction and textual enforcement in task conditions to strengthen learners’ attention to English RCs,further exploring the influence of task conditions on learners’ English RCs learning.In this study,two classes from a senior high school in Guangzhou participated in the experiment within four weeks of teaching experiments.Among them,the experimental class accepted the enhanced continuation task while the control class received the standard continuation task,and both of them took three tests of English RCs knowledge.The only difference between them is that the former strengthens learners’ attention to English RCs in the previous text through textual reinforcement and task instruction,and requiring participants to imitate those English RCs as much as possible.This study specifically addresses two research questions: 1)Does the enhanced continuation task produce greater alignment than the standard continuation task? 2)As for English RCs of different accessibility,what is the difference in the learning and maintenance effect of English RCs between the enhanced continuation task and the standard continuation task? For the first question,this study verifies it by collecting the composition of two classes and establishing two small corpora to count the number of English RCs;for the second one,by using statistical software SPSS 23.0,the study compares and analyzes the total scores and the scores of English RCs of different accessibility in the three tests of two classes,so as to answer it.Results show that the enhanced continuation task produced greater alignment than the standard continuation task;in general,the reinforcement continuation task achieves a better effect on English RCs learning than the standard one.Specifically,for the RCs of lower accessibility(SS/SO),the former is stronger than the latter,but it has certain timeliness;for the RCs of higher accessibility(OO/OS),there is no significant difference between the two types of continuation,but the former has a longer effect than the latter.To sum up,this study confirms that continuation task condition exerts a positive effect upon English RCs learning for L2 learners;at the same time,strengthening attention has an impact on the learning promoting effect.To a certain extent,it provides experimental support for Wang(2018)’s discussions on the function of task conditions in promoting L2 learning,which can provide a reference for the research and instruction of the continuation task.