A Study On The Influence Of Input Reinforcement On English Post-reading Continuation Tasks Of Senior High School Students

Based on Interactive Alignment Model,Professor Wang Chuming(2012)proposed the continuation task.A task combines reading with writing,builds creative use of language on imitation and enables learners to immediately use what is learned,which is in line with the requirement of the new curriculum for developing students’ comprehensive language skills.There has been a growing body of researchers and teachers conducting studies on continuation tasks since the implementation of the new college entrance examination.Research now shows that input reinforcement is an effective way to improve the alignment and reduce linguistic errors when learners perform continuation tasks,but such studies are scarce and have only examined short-term effects.Furthermore,it is uncertain whether input reinforcement also has a positive effect on senior high school students’ continuation tasks,and therefore there is a need for further research in this area.This study aims to explore whether input reinforcement can improve the students’ competence of English continuation tasks,specifically,it is aimed at answering the two questions: 1)Can the input reinforcement effectively improve senior high school students’ performance in English continuation tasks? If so,in what specific aspects? 2)Can the input reinforcement reduce linguistic errors in English continuation tasks of senior high school students? If so,in what specific aspects?Therefore,in order to answer these two questions,a twelve-week experiment with a mixed pretest-intervention-post-test design was carried out.A total of 80 senior high school students in Zhangzhou city participated in the experiment and were randomly assigned to two writing groups: the enhanced group and the non-enhanced group,each group consisting of 40 participants.The first week was the pretest period,which was aimed at investigating whether there were significant differences in terms of overall,linguistic,content and structural writing performance of the two groups,as well as whether linguistic errors were similar between the two groups.Week Two to Week Eleven were the intervention period,each group completing 5continuation tasks.In particular,the enhanced group received enhanced input writing tasks,while the non-enhanced group did ordinary continuation tasks.Week Twelve was the post-test,which was designed to get the answers of the two questions in this study.In addition,a total of 8 students were randomly selected from the enhanced group to participate in the interview to verify the results of this study.All the data including the pretest,intervention,and post-test were collected and analyzed through the statistical software SPSS 26.0.Results are as follows:Firstly,in the post-test of the experiment,there was a significant difference in writing competence between the enhanced group and the non-enhanced group.There were conspicuous differences between the two groups over the total scores(t=3.549,p=0.001<0.05),language(t=2.877,p=0.005<0.05)and content(t=3.229,p=0.002<0.05)with no significant difference in the structural scores(t=1.742,p=0.085>0.05).Secondly,the independent samples t-tests of linguistic errors at the intervention and post-test period revealed that for the form-based error rate,no matter in the first continuation task(t=-2.083,p=0.041<0.05),the third(t=-3.051,p=0.003<0.05),the fifth(t=-5.112,p=0.000<0.05)(Altogether five tests were conducted during the intervention period and the results of the first,the third and the fifth were selected for data analysis.)or in the post-test(t=-4.819,p = 0.000<0.05),there was a significant difference between the two groups.However,for the meaning-based error rate,neither the intervention period nor the post-test one showed a significant difference between the two groups.Thirdly,in the post-test,there was a significant difference in the form-based error rate between the two groups,especially in errors of number agreement(t =-4.387,p =0.000<0.05),errors of infinitives(t =-2.676,p = 0.000<0.05)and errors of tenses(t =-5.357,p = 0.000<0.05),but there was no significant difference in errors of articles(t =-0.047,p =0.962>0.05)or errors of link verbs(t =0.330,p=0.742>0.05).Results indicate that firstly,compared with the non-enhanced continuation task,the enhanced continuation task was more effective in improving the performance of senior high school students’ English continuation tasks,specifically in the two aspects of language and content;secondly,compared with the non-enhanced continuation task,enhanced continuation task was more effective in reducing students’ linguistic form-based errors,especially in the three categories of number agreement errors,infinitives errors and tense errors.Implications that can be drawn for the teaching of English writing from this study include: 1)teachers can integrate input reinforcement with post-reading continuation tasks in a rational way,such as reinforcing knowledge of grammar,vocabulary,and syntactic structure based on reading and writing contexts;2)teachers can use enhanced post-reading continuation tasks to reduce linguistic errors and improve students’ English competence of post-reading continuation tasks;3)when using input reinforcement,teachers can also combine it with other explicit teaching tools to improve its learning-enhancing effect.