A Study On The Effect Of Comparative Continuation Task On High School Students’ English Writing Critical Thinking Ability

The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017Edition Revised 2020)lists thinking quality as one of the core qualities of English subjects.Critical thinking ability,as a core component of thinking quality,is crucial to talents cultivation.As an effective means of expressing thoughts,writing is inseparable from the cultivation of critical thinking ability.However,for a long time,the phenomenon of attaching importance to language knowledge and ignoring the cultivation of thinking abilities in senior high school English writing teaching has not been well improved.Based on this,this study introduces the variant of continuation task under the ’ Xu-Argument ’(Wang,2016)—comparative continuation task.In the study,comparative continuation task is used as a writing task presentation method for writing test.By comparing with the traditional propositional writing task,this study explores the influence of comparative continuation task on the overall and sub-skills(analyze,infer,explain,evaluate,and reflect)of senior high school students ’ English writing critical thinking ability,in order to verify the promoting effect of comparative continuation task on the cultivation of English writing critical thinking ability.The research conducted test method and the questionnaire survey method and took 104 students from two parallel classes in Grade Two of a high school in Harbin as research objects(the number of the two classes is 48 and 56 respectively).The subjects in the group were divided into 2 groups using the within-group test method for a 12-week study.The research process included before writing test(1st-2nd week),during writing test(3rd-10th week)and after writing test(11th-12th week).The research focused on the following three questions:(1)Compared with propositional writing,does comparative continuation task have a more significant impact on senior high school students ’ English writing critical thinking ability as a whole? What is the influence on each sub-skill?(2)Compared with propositional writing,what are the effects of comparative continuation task on the overall and sub-skills of English writing critical thinking ability of overachievers and underachievers? What is the difference?(3)How can we exert the positive influence of comparative continuation task in teaching to promote the development of senior high school students ’ English writing critical thinking ability?The results showed that the comparative continuation task has a significant positive impact on senior high school students’ English writing critical thinking ability.Specifically,it has a greater impact on analyzing and explaining skills,and a relatively weak impact on inferring and evaluating skills.For overachievers and underachievers,the breadth and depth of the influence of comparative continuation task were different.Among them,the influence on the critical thinking ability of underachievers was wider,which was manifested as a significant positive impact on their 4 core sub-skills;it had a deeper influence on the critical thinking ability of overachievers,which was manifested in improving the depth and rationality of their explaining and evaluating skills.In addition,in terms of reflecting skills,no matter for all subjects or for overachievers and underachievers,the comparative continuation task can have a positive impact on the self-examine dimension,but the students ’ self-correct tendency has not been improved.In view of the five dimensions of critical thinking ability in English writing and the characteristics and differences of critical thinking ability between overachievers and underachievers,this study put forward six suggestions for comparative continuation teaching to promote the development of critical thinking ability in English writing.