A Study Of The Effects Of The Continuation Task On English Writing In Senior High School

Taking the theory of input and output hypotheses of Karshen and Swain as the theory base and enlightened by the alignment effect of the combination of comprehension and production argued by Pickering and Garrod and inspired by the findings of studies of the Continuation Task,the present study delves into investigating the alignment effect of the Continuation Task on English writing complexity,accuracy and fluency in senior high school.Quantitative and qualitative research methods namely tests and interviews were adopted to answer the three research questions raised by the author.Specifically,three questions are as follows:(1)Can the Continuation Task promote the development of students’ English writing complexity?(2)Can the Continuation Task promote the development of students’ English writing accuracy?(3)Can the Continuation Task promote the development of students’ English writing fluency?Participants of this study involved two intact parallel classes with a total number of 121 senior two students.Students in the two classes were randomly chosen as the experimental class who conducted the Continuation Task of completing an incomplete story and the control class who manipulated Topic Writing Task of the same topic without input reading material.The whole experiment lasted for 10 weeks and data of three tests were collected and analyzed by the computational tool SPSS 17.The interview was conducted as a supplement to the interpretation of results of the tests,revealing students’ attitude towards the Continuation Task.Based on the independent samples t-test,results revealed that participants in the Continuation Task achieved higher writing performance in terms of writing complexity,accuracy and fluency,which were as the following.(1)Under the Continuation Task,students’ writing complexity yielded significant results for students’ writing complexity has improved 0.8 and 0.71 points respectively when comparing the mean scores of the first and the second post-tests with the pretest which can be justified by the frequent appearance of complex and various structures and subordinate and coordinate clauses of students’ final products in the Continuation Task.Besides,distinct significance at the level of.001 and marked distinction at the level of.002 were respectively detected in the first and the second post-tests,which confirmed the view that writing complexity produced the alignment effect in terms of sophistic words and chunks of English writing and the alignment effect was continuous after one month without treatment.(2)The conduction of the Continuation Task also exerted a profound influence on writing accuracy,dramatically reducing the use of language structure errors but the alignment effect faded without the implementation of the Continuation Task.Initially,the alignment effect distinctly demonstrated itself in the first post-test for the mean score of EC increased by 0.83 points and distinct significance was also detected at the level of.002.However,this alignment effect significantly decreased for no significance was detected in the second post-test,which indicated that alignment manifested itself in the Continuation but quickly retreated without treatment.(3)The implementation of the Continuation Task also facilitated the development of writing fluency by exposing students to sufficient language context,which motivated them to produce essays with larger numbers of words logically and cohesively based on the increase of 0.63 and 0.64 points in the first and the second post-tests but there existed no marked significance according to the results of independent samples t-tests,which indicated that both the Continuation Task and Topic Writing Task boosted the development of writing fluency.In addition,with the supplement of the interviews conducted on participants in experimental class,results showed that the Continuation Task appealed to them,arousing their writing interests and desire to express themselves.Due to the fact that the Continuation Task is still not the same as the one tested in the participants’ province,which results in the neglect of this method,thus influencing the results of the study to some extent.The study is consistent with students’ needs to improve their English writing ability.Additionally,these findings also further validate the application and feasibility of the Continuation Task in second language teaching and also render supporting evidence to the alignment effect claimed by Wang Chuming that coupling comprehension and production brings about alignment.