The Effect Of The Input Material’s Text Length On Narrative Continuation Writing

Since Guangdong Province implemented the reform of the National Matriculation Entrance Test(known as Gaokao),narrative continuation writing task has been adopted as a test item,whose input material’s text length is about 350 words,which is different from the text length of the input story during daily English teaching.As a result,this research aims to investigate the influence that stories of different lengths but with the same main content have on continuation writing,including the effect on the following aspects: the amount of informative content,the students’ performance,the cognitive attribute of writing and the cultural awareness competence reflected in continuation writing,which could provide empirical evidence for daily teaching practice and bettering the continuation writing item in Gaokao.The research integrated and refined an assessment framework for writing cognitive attribute and cultural awareness of narrative continuation writing based on reviewing literature.Four input material texts were obtained by adapting The Personality Potion selected from the “Good English 9” series.These input texts have the same main content as well as the same given opening sentence of each continuation writing paragraph,but they have different text lengths.It has been ensured that the four texts have no significant differences in lexical difficulty,syntactic difficulty and text difficulty.80 senior three students from a senior high school of Guangdong Province were selected to take part in the research.The students were divided into four high-marks groups and four common groups according to their average scores of two monthly tests,and there is no significant differences within the high-marks groups and the common groups respectively.After the students finished the continuation writing task,two teachers graded the writing respectively in terms of cognitive attribute of writing and cultural awareness competence according to the assessment framework put forward by the research.The cognitive attribute of writing includes three dimensions: content and conception,text structure and language use.The cultural awareness competence includes two dimensions: cultural behaviors and cultural perspectives.The average of the two scores graded by the two teachers in each dimension serves as the final score.If the differential between the two scores is over 3 points,a third teacher is to grade the writing,and the final score would be the average of the two scores that have a smaller differential.The research results show that: in narrative continuation writing,input materials of different text lengths but with the same main content,lexical difficulty,syntactic difficulty,text difficulty and given opening sentence of each continuation writing paragraph,(1)have no influence on the informative content of continuation writing;(2)influence the students’ performance significantly,and the impact varies in students of different competence levels;(3)have a significant effect on the cognitive attribute reflected in the continuation writing,and the effect differs in students of different competence levels;(4)affect the cultural awareness competence reflected in the continuation writing obviously,and the influence is different owing to students’ competence levels.Implications of the findings are as follows: when using narrative continuation writing task during English language teaching practice,increasing the text length of the input story is favorable to cultivating the students’ cognitive ability regarding narrative continuation writing as well as their cultural awareness.In addition,since narrative continuation writing is a test item in Gaokao,careful consideration should be given to the effect of the input story’s text length on different level students to ensure the fairness of Gaokao.However,given that the sample size of this research is relatively small,the division of high-marks group and common group is limited to the subjects of this research,the tool used to measure text difficulty index was just developed in the last two years and thus it has not been tested by long-term practice or universally recognized,and that the differential between the neighbouring texts of the four adapted input stories is within 400 words,the research findings are not representative.Future studies could make some improvements from the following aspects: expand the number of subjects,enlarge the research scale as well as increase the differential between text lengths of the adapted input stories.