Effects Of POA On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Coherence In Continuation Task

Writing coherence is one of the most crucial criteria for evaluating writing quality in continuation tasks.Despite its importance,there is limited literature available on how to improve writing coherence in such tasks.Production-oriented Approach(POA)is a teaching method that has proven its effectiveness in College English Listening,Speaking,Reading and Writing classes in China.However there are few studies that have explored the application of POA in continuation tasks,particularly in terms of improving writing coherence.This study applies POA in continuation task teaching to address the following two research questions:(1)What are the effects of POA on senior high school students’ linguistic coherence in continuation tasks?(2)What are the effects of POA on senior high school students’ content coherence in continuation tasks?This study aims to investigate the effects of POA on writing coherence in continuation task through experimental research.A teaching experimental was conducted with an experimental class that received POA-based continuation task teaching,and a control class that received instruction based on Task-based Language Teaching(TBLT).The author collected 99 pieces of students’ sequel texts in pre-test and 106 pieces in post-test.These were integrated with the original stimulus text to generate a complete continuation text.The author then transcribed those handwritten texts,205 pieces of sequel texts(to test local coherence)and 205 pieces of complete continuation texts(to test global coherence),into 410 digital text files.The text analysis tool Coh-Metrix3.0 was used to process each of the 410 text files into 106 indices.From these,6 indices for linguistic coherence and 8 indices for content coherence were selected and the data were stored in an Excel sheet.Finally,through paired-samples t-test and independent samples t-test,the statistical results of linguistic coherence and content coherence were computed.The results show that POA continuation task teaching has improved both linguistic and content coherence of continuation task writing.Firstly,compared with pre-test,POA led to enhancements in both local and global linguistic coherence of continuation task in post-test,as evidenced by significant improvements in the indices of Narrativity,Syntactic simplicity,Word concreteness and Referential cohesion(P<0.05).Secondly,compared with pre-test,POA improved both local and global content coherence of continuation task in post-test,which reflects in the indices of Verb cohesion,Temporal cohesion,tense and aspect repetition,LSA overlap of all sentences in paragraph and Intentional verb(P<0.05).Finally,compared with TBLT continuation task teaching,POA shows great superiority in improving linguistic coherence in the indices of Word concreteness,Referential cohesion(P<0.05),and in content coherence of Verb cohesion,LSA overlap of all sentences in paragraph and LSA overlap of adjacent paragraphs(P<0.05).Overall,these findings provide strong evidence of the effectiveness of POA as an instructional approach to improve writing coherence in continuation task assignments,and offer valuable insights into the development of effective teaching methods for continuation task teaching.