Study On Alignment Effects Of Comparative Continuation On English Writing Of Senior High School

The New English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017 Edition)emphasizes the cultivation of students’ English language ability in English teaching.Students should be able to express their opinions creatively by using written language,so as to conduct interpersonal communication smoothly.However,at present,the teaching methods of English writing in senior high school are relatively single,the teaching effects are far from effective,and the students usually have some difficulties in English writing in terms of vocabulary,content cohesion,text format and so on.The continuation,proposed by Professor Wang Chuming,combines reading with writing.Its alignment and promotion effects have been confirmed by many researchers in the field of English writing research.The comparative continuation,as a variant of the continuation,can enhance the interaction intensity between learners and reading materials,and maximize the continuation task efficacy.Therefore,based on the interactive alignment model and “continuation” theory,this study applies the comparative continuation to senior high school English writing teaching,and aims to explore whether there are differences in the alignment level and error types between argumentative comparative continuation and narrative comparative continuation.The study conducts the teaching experiment of comparative continuation in Qin’an No.2 Middle School for 8 weeks.The research participants are from two parallel classes,Class 4 and Class 5 of Senior One,and each class has 40 students.And the participants are required to complete the comparative continuation every two weeks.The task for Class 4 is the argumentative comparative continuation while participants in Class 5are required to complete the narrative comparative continuation.Then participants’ compositions are collected,the valid compositions are sorted out and the alignment differences are retrieved between the two classes in terms of word frequency analysis,keyword analysis,and n-gram phrase alignment analysis through the tool of Ant Conc3.4.4.In the end,the SPSS24.0 is used to calculate and compare the error types and the error rates in the continuation of the two classes.Based on the data results,the findings of this study can be summarized as follows.First,compared with argumentative comparative continuation,narrative comparative continuation is more likely to activate students’ language output,which is conducive to promoting language fluency,while the overall error numbers in the genre of argumentation are less than that of narration,resulting in a higher writing accuracy.Second,from the perspective of the number of aligned words and phrases,the overall alignment number of narrative comparative continuation is higher than that of argumentative comparative continuation.At the same time,the results also indicates that no matter what genre of the comparative continuation,the participants tend to imitate and use the language expression provided by the reading texts.Third,at the level of error types and error rates,six error types occur in both participants’ writings of the two genres,but there are significant differences in the error rates about tense errors and Chinglish errors of the two genres.This study shows certain pedagogical implications for English writing teaching.In teaching,teachers can choose different text genres with appropriate topics and difficulty as reading materials for continuation.And then teachers can guide students to explore the text highlights as well as pay more attention to text coherence skills and summary skills.Through the comparative continuation,students can not only promote their language expression ability but also enhance the cultivation of writing ability with different genres.