The Effects Of The Comparative Continuation Task On Business Report Writing

With increased international business activities in China,the importance of business English(BE)writing becomes increasingly prominent.As an essential part of BE writing,business reports play an irreplaceable role in problem-solving and decision-making within/with enterprises.However,there is a lack of systematic and efficient methods in the teaching of BE writing in general and BE report writing in particular for L2 learners majoring in BE.The comparative continuation task(CCT)may be a way out because it proves to be a highly efficient means of teaching and learning L2 writing.The present study intended to explore the effects of the CCT on teaching BE report writing with a view to introducing the method into the field of BE teaching.Specifically,the study aimed to answer the following questions: 1)To what extent does the comparative continuation task affect the L2 learners’ business report writing performance? 2)What are the effects of the comparative continuation task on the linguistic features of L2 learners’ business report writing at the lexical,syntactical and structural levels?To obtain answers to the research questions,a four-week experiment was designed and complemented with 42 college sophomores majoring in business English as the subjects who were assigned to two groups.In the experiment,the Control Group adopted a conventional way of teaching,while the Experimental Group the CCT.The subjects’ written productions were then collected and analyzed in several steps.First,the overall quality and information structure of the subjects’ writings were rated according to the BEC scoring criteria and structure scoring criteria.Second,the Lexical Complexity Analyzer and Syntactic Complexity Analyzer were used to gather data of the lexical and syntactic complexity of the writings.Third,SPSS was used to test the significant differences,if any,of these data between the pretest and post-test in the two groups.It is found that the CCT can significantly improve the information structure and overall quality of learners’ business reports(i.e.,their writings).In terms of lexical complexity,the CCT can reduce the lexical density and increase the lexical complexity of their business reports.Regarding syntactic complexity,the CCT can increase the length of learners’ written productions and promote their use of complex nominals.As clear information structure,low lexical density,high lexical and syntactic complexity are found to feature BE reports(Duan,2019;Huang,2014;Xu,2015),the findings provided evidence that the CCT can make an effective facilitator of teaching BE report writing.Implications of the present study for the teaching of BE writing were also discussed,and suggestions for making the best of the CCT in BE teaching offered.