A Study Of The Effects Of Discourse-analysis-based Teaching Mode On Senior High School Students’ Continuation Writing Ability

Continuation task is considered to have advantage of enhancing L2 teaching and learning efficiency,and has been gaining more attention since it was selected into Zhejiang NMET.It has become one of the widely concerned research hotspots in high school English teaching especially after Jiangsu NMET was reformed.However,teachers are faced with a good number of challenges in practice,for lack of teaching experience and systematic and effective theoretical instruction on this new form of writing task.There are large gaps in the research on continuation task teaching at present.Under the guidance of National English Curriculum Standards for General High School,students’ discourse ability comes into focus.Discourse analysis has been widely applied in the teaching of reading and writing,while continuation task requires competence of the both.Hence,this research employs discourse analysis in continuation task teaching to explore the effect of discourse-analysis-based teaching mode on high school students’ ability of continuation writing,by focusing on the following three questions:(1)What effects does discourse-analysis-based teaching mode have on students’ comprehension of reading materials?(2)What effects does discourseanalysis-based teaching mode have on macrostructure of students’ continuation?(3)What effects does discourse-analysis-based teaching mode have on microstructure of students’ continuation?The research was undertaken in a key high school in Nanjing city,Jiangsu Province.82 students from two parallel classes in senior three were selected as research subjects,divided into an experimental class and a control class.The author gave lessons to both classes with discourse-analysis-based teaching mode and conventional teaching mode respectively,collected data by means of questionnaire survey,continuation writing tests,reading comprehension tests and interviews,and then analyzed the data with the aid of SPSS 25.0,Coh-Metrix 3.0 and manual scoring and counting,etc.,exploring the influence of discourse analysis on students’ continuation writing ability.The result shows:(1)Through teaching experiments,EC students’ awareness of using discourse analysis knowledge to interpret reading materials is significantly improved,which to a certain extent,promotes their understanding of the article and helps them predict the development of the continuation and the theme of the story.(2)Under the influence of this teaching mode,apparent improvement of EC students’ arrangement of overall structure and main points of the continuation is revealed,and the habit of planning the layout before writing is formed.(3)The consciousness and ability of EC students in employing various cohesive methods are significantly enhanced,and both local and global coherences of their continuation are considerably strengthened,but there is a lack of clear recognition of coherence among some students.The implications of this study of the continuation writing teaching are as follows:(1)The teaching model based on discourse analysis should be introduced to high school English continuation task teaching,combined with other effective teaching methods,so as to improve students’ continuation writing ability from several respects.(2)Integrate the training of discourse analysis into the teaching of narrative reading,and employ reading strategies(such as scanning,prediction,etc.)to train students’ discourse analysis ability,and help them feel the logic and coherence of the text during reading.(3)Apply the teaching mode based on discourse analysis to long-term teaching practice,to gradually help students form a discourse analysis thinking mode.