An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Comparative Continuation On The Coherence Of English Argumentative Writing In Senior High School

Argumentative writing plays a vital role in senior high school English writing and is an important embodiment of the language output ability of senior high school English core literacy.According to the National English Curriculum Standard for Senior High Schools(2017 Editon Revised in 2020),students are required to write clear,logical and coherent argumentative writing.Coherence,as an important criterion to measure the quality of writing,is often neglected by teachers and students in daily teaching and learning.Hence,it is significant to find ways to improve the coherence of English argumentative writing.Since Continuation Task was put forward in 2012,it has been widely concerned by researchers.In order to strengthen the interaction between readers and materials,Wang Chuming further proposed Comparative Continuation.Comparative Continuation,as a variant of Continuation Task,is especially suitable for continuation of argumentation.More importantly,Comparative Continuation can promote students to further interact with the original text by increasing the number of reading back,and imitating the cohesion and coherence of the previous text to produce a leveling effect.Based on previous studies on Comparative Continuation,this study attempts to apply Comparative Continuation to the teaching of English argumentative writing in senior high schools,and explores the effect of Comparative Continuation on linguistic coherence and content coherence of English argumentative writing.The research mainly focuses on the following two questions:(1)What is the effect of Comparative Continuation on linguistic coherence of senior high school students’ English argumentative writing?(2)What is the effect of Comparative Continuation on content coherence of senior high school students’ English argumentative writing?The subjects selected for this study are 100 students in two parallel classes in Grade 11 of senior high school in Hengshui City,Hebei Province.The whole teaching experiment lasts for three months.The control class adopts topic writing,while the experimental class adopts Comparative Continuation.The pre-test and post-test compositions of this study are statistically analyzed by Coh-Metrix 3.0,and linguistic coherence and content coherence data are analyzed by SPSS 23.0.In order to gain more insight into students’ perceptions of Comparative Continuation and coherence,the author collects qualitative data by interviewing six randomly selected students in the experimental class.The major findings of the research are drawn as follows.Compared with topic writing,Comparative Continuation has a positive effect on improving students’ linguistic coherence and content coherence.First,in terms of linguistic coherence,Comparative Continuation has a significant impact on improving students’ word concreteness,syntactic simplicity,overlap between adjacent sentences,referential cohesion and causal cohesion.Second,in terms of content coherence,Comparative Continuation has a significant impact on improving students’ deep cohesion,logical cohesion,temporal cohesion and overlap of all sentences.To sum up,this study reveals that Comparative Continuation has a positive effect on the coherence of English argumentative writing among senior high school students.In the process of Comparative Continuation,teachers can consciously cultivate students’ textual awareness and give feedback on students’ compositions in time,so as to better improve the coherence of students’ English argumentative writing.It is hoped that this study can bring some enlightenment for teachers to use Comparative Continuation in teaching practice.