An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Comparative Continuation On Junior High School Students’ English Writing Anxiety

It is widely acknowledged that writing plays a crucial role in English learning.However,writing anxiety disturbs students for a long time,making it difficult for them to develop their writing ability.Although considerable research has been done on how to release writing anxiety,the effective ways to alleviate L2 writing anxiety are still undeveloped,which remains an urgent problem in English teaching.As one of the variants for further improvement of the continuation task,the comparative continuation is widely popular for its enhancement of interaction between the texts and the learners,and its advantages in facilitating learning have been gradually verified.Nevertheless,there are few researches on the application of comparative continuation in the alleviation of language learners’ negative emotions.Therefore,based on the Interactive Alignment Theory and the Xu-argument,this study aims to explore the effects of comparative continuation on the alleviation of junior high school students’ anxiety in their English writing,and the two research questions will be discussed: 1)Can the comparative continuation alleviate junior high school students’ English writing anxiety? If yes,in what aspects can the comparative continuation alleviate junior high school students’ English writing anxiety(Classroom teaching anxiety,conceiving anxiety,avoidance behavior and lack of confidence)? 2)What are the differences in the effects of the comparative continuation on the alleviation of junior high school students with different anxiety levels?A total of 90 students from two parallel classes in Grade 8 of a middle school in Tianhe District,Guangzhou participated in the 8-week experiment.The two classes were randomly taken as the experimental class(EC)and the control class(CC).The whole experiment was conducted as follows: a pre-test of the SLWAI questionnaire was completed by all participants to get their writing anxiety levels before the experiment.Subsequently,the participants were divided into low,middle and high anxiety groups according to the partition standard provided by Oxford &Burry-Stock(1995);during the experiment,the participants in EC completed two rounds of comparative continuation tasks,while the regular writing teaching method was conducted in CC;after the experiment,a post-test of the SLWAI questionnaire was completed by participants and semi-structured interviews were conducted,in which 3 English teachers and 10 students in EC were interviewed.Finally,the data from questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS 26.0 and the records of interviews were converted into texts for analysis.The results show that: 1)The comparative continuation can effectively alleviate junior high school students’ English writing anxiety,with the most obvious effects on conceiving anxiety and avoidance behavior;2)There are different effects of the comparative continuation on students with different levels of writing anxiety: first,for students with low and high levels of anxiety,the comparative continuation can significantly alleviate conceiving anxiety and avoidance behavior,but has no significant effects on classroom teaching anxiety and lack of confidence;second,for students with middle levels of anxiety,the comparative continuation can dramatically alleviate lack of confidence,but has no obvious effect on the other three aspects.To sum up,the comparative continuation can effectively alleviate junior high school students’ English writing anxiety in teaching practice.With the application of comparative continuation in English writing teaching,learners can creatively construct the writing content by consciously choosing and imitating useful expressions from the reading texts.It is suggested that teachers should carefully select the reading texts suitable for students’ cognitive levels with the purpose of maximizing the learning effect of comparative continuation.