An Empirical Study Of The Continuation Task In Senior High School English Writing From The Perspective Of Xu-argument

Writing plays an irreplaceable role in the five basic language skills of listening,reading,speaking,viewing and writing.The English Curriculum Standards for General High School(MOE,2020)defines that language skills are an crucial section of language ability.Language skills consist of listening,speaking,reading,viewing and writing.Among them,listening,reading and viewing are comprehension skills,while speaking and writing are expressive skills.Both of them complete and promote each other in the process of language learning.Students should develop their language skills through a large number of special and integrate language activities to lay the foundation for authentic communication.However,over many years,the teaching of English writing has been the weak point among these five basic skills.For many teachers,it is difficult to improve students’ skills in using written language on the second language acquisition with the traditional topic-writing task in which teachers assign topics and provide examples for students to imitate.At the same time,it is also easy to make students lack motivation to write in English.In this context,how to use the theory and how to promote students’ writing performance through classroom teaching has become one of the major research issues we need to solve.In view of the above situation,the current study is built on the input hypothesis theory,alignment effects,the output hypothesis,and Xu-argument.The author carries out a three-month teaching experiment on the continuation task with students in senior class 270 and class 274 of a high school in Xiangfen,with a total number of 86 students.Among them,class 270 is the experimental class and class 274 is the control class.In the experimental class,the author uses the continuation task as a teaching approach,while the traditional topic-writing task is applied in the control class.This study will answer the following three questions:(1)What are the effects of the continuation task on the motivation of English writing in senior high school learners?(2)What are the effects of the continuation task in improving learners’ English writing performance of senior high school?(3)What effects do the alignment effects of the continuation task have on the linguistic accuracy in English writing about senior high school learners?The research instruments used in this study are questionnaires,interview,tests and SPSS25.0.The author collects data and analyzes them to obtain the following conclusions:(1)the continuation task improves the students’ motivation to write in the EC to a certain extent,and the students are more inclined to accept the continuation task than the traditional topic-writing task.(2)the continuation task is more conducive to improving students’ writing performance than the traditional task.The students’ scores of the EC are better than that of the CC in the post-test.(3)The continuation task can effectively help students reduce errors in writing and improve accuracy in their writing.Therefore,this study confirms the effectiveness of continuation task in high school English writing teaching,and provides a method that can be used for teaching English writing in senior high school.The following implications are obtained from the study of this paper: First,teachers should choose appropriate writing tasks according to students’ actual situation,motivate students to write in English.Second,teachers should select reading materials that are appropriate to the learners’ language level.Finally,teachers should give timely feedback,which not only helps teachers keep abreast of students’ learning,but also helps students find out the problems in writing and correct them in time.In addition,the author has some deficiencies in the experiment,such as the lack of teaching experience,the short duration of the experiment,the subjective factors of the subjects and so on,which need to be further improved in the future.