| As one of the basic skills,writing is a comprehensive reflection of the learners’ language ability.The General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards suggest that students should be able to use appropriate linguistic devices in their writing,such as connectives,indicative pronouns and verbal articulation,emphasizing the structural features,logical relationships and take-up relationships of the discourse.As it can be seen coherence is one of the essential criteria to measure the level of writing.However,in practice,there are still many problems with the coherence of students’ English writing.Students’ writings are more likely to lack the syntactic or semantic coherence.Therefore,it’s necessary to explore effective way to improve students’ ability to express themselves coherently.Continuation task was presented by professor Wang Chuming in 2010,which has become the focus in the language teaching and research.Great achievements have been achieved and the promoting effect of the continuation task has been proved in listening,speaking,writing,translation and grammar learning.However,relatively few studies related to the effect of continuation task on the coherence of English writing are conducted and the relevant research in this area mainly focus more on colleges students than high school students.Therefore,based on the interactive alignment theory,cohesion and coherence theory,and input-output theory,the study aims to explore the impact of the continuation task on the coherence of senior high school students English writing with the help of test and interview.The study attempts to answer the two research questions:(1)What is the impact of continuation task on the syntactic coherence of English writing of senior high school students?(2)What is the impact of continuation task on the semantic coherence of English writing of senior high school students?In this experiment,108 students from two parallel classes in the first grade of a senior high school in the First Middle School of Luquan District,Shijiazhuang,were selected as subjects.The EC adopted continuation task,while the CC continued to use topic writing.The pre-test was conducted before the experiment to ensure there was no significant difference between EC and CC.After 8 weeks’ experiments,students in both classes took the post-test.The pre-test and post-test papers were selected from the College Entrance Exams Paper I in2020 and 2022,which are of high reliability and validity.Data were collected and analyzed with the help of Coh-metrix,then the data acquired were input into SPSS 26.0 for correlation analysis and independent sample t-test and paired samples t-test.Finally,eight students were selected from EC as interviewees to help to discuss the data of the tests.The study results showed(1)Continuation task has a facilitative effect on the syntactic coherence of high school students’ English writing.The three indicators(narrativity,syntactic simplicity and word concreteness)are significantly affected.The syntactic coherence is improved by the synergistic effect of students’ interaction with the sequel when reading.(2)Continuation task facilitates the semantic coherence of high school students’ English writing.The four indicators(verb cohesion,temporal cohesion,overlap of all sentences and intentional cohesion)receive significant effects.With the context and language imitation of the reading materials,learners are more likely to grasp the main idea correctly in the continuation task and develop the plot coherently and fluently.This study further verifies that continuation task has a positive effect on English writing,especially on the coherence of English writing of senior high school students,which has specific implications in teaching of English writing.However,this study has the limitations of insufficient duration of experiment and single article genre.The subsequent study can be appropriately prolonged and different article genres can be adopted for the future research. |
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