A Study On The Application Of The Continuation Task To English Writing Instruction In Senior High School

Among the language skills mentioned in the new English Curriculum,writing plays a significant role in senior high school English learning and teaching.However,a great number of senior high school students still face the problems of weak English writing competence and lacking English writing motivation.Also,English writing instruction in senior high school is faced with the problem of separation of input and output and student’s English writing is usually separated from the linguistic environment.In order to solve the problems existing in the English writing instruction,Wang Chuming put forward the continuation task teaching method,which aims to combine reading with writing and provide context and discourse support for writers,so as to achieve the goal of helping students to output through input.With the promotion of the new round of education reform,the continuation task has been included into the scope of the college entrance examination by many provinces,and the method of continuation task has again attracted the attention of many researchers and educators.So far,the researches on continuation task teaching method have been mainly applied in universities.And the empirical researches on the influence of the continuation task on high school students’ English writing ability and writing motivation are relatively less and incomplete.Consequently,more empirical researches on the continuation task from more detailed angles should be carried out in senior high school.On account of the above situation,the author conducted an empirical study based on the input hypothesis,output hypothesis and alignment and interaction theory.Taking 70 students in Grade Two in Qingdao No.39 Middle School as the research participants,the author adopted the continuation task teaching method in the experimental class and the proposition writing teaching method in the control class,aiming to study the effect of the continuation method on the writing ability and writing motivation of senior high school students.This paper attempts to answer the following questions:(1)How does the continuation task affect senior high school students’ English writing ability?(2)How does continuation task enhance senior high school students’ English writing motivation?The whole experiment lasted for 12 weeks and the experimental tools included questionnaires,tests,an interview,SPSS 23.0 and Coh-Metrix 3.0.Before the experiment,all the participants have a pre-test to make sure there were no significant differences between the two groups in English writing competence.After the experiment,the author used SPSS 23.0 and Coh-Metrix 3.0 to analyze the results of the experiment.The following conclusions are drawn:(1)The continuation task improves the students’ writing level more prominently than the conventional proposition writing teaching method,and the scores of experimental group are better than those of the control group in the post-test.(2)Compared with proposition writing,the continuation task teaching method can significantly improve students’ English writing competence in syntactic richness,lexical diversity and article complexity.However,there are no significant differences between the two groups in terms of language coherence in post-test.(3)To some degree,the continuation task teaching method can improve students’ English writing motivation,and experimental class students’ deep motivation are greatly improved.The study shows that the English writing competence and motivation of senior high school students can be prominently improved by the continuation task teaching method,and it also provides a practical method for senior high school English writing instruction.