The Effect Of Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ English Argumentative Writing

Writing,as one of the critical skills in language learning,plays a vital role in enhancing students’ language competence.Argumentative writing requires students to be proficient in syntactic and lexical knowledge,and to demonstrate argumentation clearly,which poses challenges to students.Therefore,it is very crucial to employ effective teaching methods to advance students’ argumentative writing ability.Continuation task is extensively employed in second language teaching,due to the merit of offering readers the opportunity to imitate standard language and create new content.However,this task is predominately used for narration,and other genres,especially argumentative essays,are rarely involved.Based on the reasons above,this study is aimed at achieving the following two goals.First,it is to verify the efficiency of continuation task on students’ holistic scores of argumentative writing,as well as participants’ specific performance in writing fluency,accuracy and complexity.Second,it is to examine the effects of continuation task on students’ writing attitudes.Therefore,supported by Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Pickering and Grarrod’s Interactive Alignment Theory,this study is implemented.As for the experiment,the subjects are from two parallel classes of Qin’an senior high school,40 students in each class.The experimental materials are five incomplete argumentative passages.The experiment lasts for 12 weeks.The first week is for pretest and first questionnaire survey.From the second week to the eleventh week,teaching treatment is carried out.During this period,one class performs continuation task.Subjects in this class firstly read an incomplete argumentative essay then make a complement of this essay.While the subjects in the other class just finish the proposition writing on the same topic.In the twelfth week,post-test and the second questionnaire are finished.Concerning research results,Jacobs’ writing profile,Wolfe-Quintero’s T-units,test paper and questionnaires are employed to collect and analyze subjects’ holistic writing scores,writing fluency,accuracy and complexity as well as their attitudes to writing.Ultimately,in tune with results,three striking conclusions can be summarized as follows.Firstly,compared with control class,the holistic scores of subjects in the experimental class can be better improved in their post-tests.In terms of writing fluency,accuracy and complexity,continuation task outperforms the product approach in improving students’ writing accuracy and complexity.More evidently,continuation task exerts the biggest effect on writing accuracy;meanwhile,continuation task could also play its advantage in changing students’ attitudes to writing.In line with conclusions above,three instruction implications are put forward.Firstly,teachers should employ continuation task actively in English argumentative writing class.For it can offer impetus to enhance students’ holistic writing scores,writing fluency,accuracy and complexity.Secondly,teachers should be aware of the difficulty of reading materials,which ought to be appropriate to the students’ current English proficiency level.Finally,teachers should apply continuation task to cultivate students’ writing habits,thinking mode as well as emotion for writing,so as to change students’ attitudes to writing.