Effects Of The Comparative Continuation Task On EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing

Argumentative writing is of great significance to Chinese postgraduate learners of English.It can develop students’ critical thinking competence and English literacy.Argumentative writing has been used in examinations like IELTS,TOFEL and GRE.Offering language input to facilitating language learning is a focused issue.Past studies focused on the corrective feedback which was a kind of input form to promote writing.This method was not comprehensive since it only focused on the grammar without paying attention to the context.The continuation task could offer the context and it could provide the learners with the model essay which is a kind of positive input.In this way,it could evoke the alignment between writing and the context,thus producing learning effect.According to xu argument proposed by Wang Chuming,comparative continuation task is a good way to improve argumentative writing.It can render students to conduct creative imitation based on the context,thus enhancing their writing production level.In the comparative continuation task,the argumentation is used as the reading material and students are required to compare their viewpoints to those of the reading material in their writings.Most of the existing studies pertinent to the continuation task focused on the narration.Up till now,few studies have focused on the argumentation.There lacks research on the effects of the comparative continuation task on EFL learners’ argumentative writing.The aim of this research is to study the effects of the comparative continuation task on EFL learners’ argumentative writing.The research questions are: 1)What are the effects of comparative continuation task on the accuracy of EFL learners’ argumentative writing? 2)What are the effects of comparative continuation task on the complexity of EFL learners’ argumentative writing? 3)What are the effects of comparative continuation task on the fluency of EFL learners’ argumentative writing ?The research recruited 60 participants who were first-year non-English major postgraduate students in a university of science and engineering.The students were assigned into two groups based on their CET-6 English writing pretest to ensure that they have the same English writing proficiency level.The treatment group included30 students while the control group included 30 students.The writing experiment lasted for five weeks.In the first and the fifth week,all students were required to finish the pretest and the posttest.From the second to the fourth week,the treatment group students were required to complete 3 comparative continuation tasks and the control group students were required to complete 3 topic writing tasks.The writing topics were interesting and related to students’ life.The two writing topics of the CET-6 examination from the same set were chosen as the pretest writing topic and the posttest writing topic to ensure that the two writing topics had the same difficulty level.The independent T-tests were used to analyze the effects of the comparative continuation task on EFL learners’ argumentative writing.The results illustrated that the comparative continuation task could avoid L1 transfer and reduce errors through alignment effect,thus improving the accuracy of EFL learners’ argumentative writing.Since comparative continuation task included more elements and had more reasoning demands,it could improve the complexity of EFL learners’ argumentative writing.Furthermore,the language input of the reading material of the comparative continuation task could solve the avoidance phenomenon,thus rendering learners to produce more complex linguistic expressions in their English writings.The results also showcased that the comparative continuation task could not improve the fluency of EFL learners’ argumentative writing at the same time,which was in accordance with the trade-off hypothesis.That was to say,the learners could not pay attention to accuracy,complexity and fluency at the same time.Moreover,accuracy,complexity and fluency involved different linguistic systems.To be specific,accuracy and complexity were related to rule system while fluency was pertinent to memory system.As comparative continuation task and topic writing task both belonged to the language output exercise to render the linguistic message to enter into the long-term memory system,there existed no difference in terms of fluency.The collaborative comparative continuation task could be implemented in the further study to increase the chunks which could be retrieved from the linguistic resource pool,thus improving the fluency.The implications of this research are as follows.Theoretically speaking,as a newly emerged writing task based on xu argument,this research focusing on comparative continuation task could broaden the scope of the application of xu theory and further lends credence to the learning effect of the continuation task.Practically speaking,this research on comparative continuation task also has significance for English academic writing training for postgraduate students.It can enhance the English academic literacy of postgraduate students.The comparative continuation task could provide a teaching activity design with strong plausibility and make up for the shortage of lack of interaction and context in English language learning environment in China.The comparative continuation task has significance for constructing highly effective teaching mode and prompting the reform of foreign language teaching practice with Chinese characteristics.