An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of The Iterative Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Performance

According to General Senior High School Curriculum Standard English(2017 Edition),English writing can highly reflect the students’ comprehensive language application ability.Therefore,it is important for English learners to improve their writing performance.Writing complexity,accuracy,and fluency as criteria in measuring EFL learners’ writing performance have attracted more and more researchers’ attention.The iterative continuation task is advocated as a variant of continuation task to strengthen the interaction intensity between interlocutors and improve students’ writing performance.This study aims to explore the influence of the iterative continuation task on senior high school students’ English writing performance through the experiment and self-reflections,so as to shed some light on writing pedagogy.Therefore,the current study mainly discusses the following two questions:(1)Does the iterative continuation task promote students’ English writing performance?(2)What are the differences in the improvement of English writing complexity,accuracy and fluency in the iterative continuation task?To this end,100 participants in two classes from Qiongzhong High School Attached to Central China Normal University are recruited,and the two classes are divided into experimental class and control class randomly.The results of pre-test confirm that there are no significant differences between two groups.Then,a 12-week experiment is carried out in these two parallel classes.The teacher of the two classes is exactly the same except for the type of writing teaching mode.Writing complexity,accuracy,and fluency of continuous writing are used to measure students’ writing performance.As for the measurement index of complexity,the clauses per T-unit(C/T)and the dependent clauses per clause(DC/C)are adopted.Error-free T-units per T-unit(EFT/T)and errors per T-unit(E/T)are used to measure accuracy.The words per T-unit(W/T)and the words per clause(W/C)are indicated for fluency.The experiment results show as follows:Generally speaking,the iterative continuation task is beneficial to improve the English writing performance of senior high school students.Specifically,the improvements in the complexity,accuracy,and fluency of writing language have been inconsistent.Firstly,the iterative continuation task can improve the complexity of T-units and dependent clauses.According to the analysis of students’ individual reflections,the iterative continuation task can enhance learners’ awareness of the complexity of their writings.Compared with the control class,the students in experimental class have a stronger awareness of using complex sentence structures such as compound sentences and clauses to enhance the diversity of sentence structures.Secondly,there is no significant effect of iterative continuation task on improving the accuracy of written language.According to an in-depth examination of students’ error types,the iterative continuation task can significantly help students to improve the lexical accuracy and cohesion while writing.However,it is found that the grammar accuracy of students’ writing does not improve obviously.Thirdly,students’ writing fluency can be significantly improved after the iterative continuation task.In the same time,the length of T-unit and clause of students’ writing in the experimental class is significantly longer than that of the control class,which means the fluency of students’ writing in the experimental class is higher.Students’ personal reflections show that iterative continuation task can deepen students’ understanding of writing fluency.