Application Of Comparative Continuation To Non-English Majors’ English Writing Instruction

English writing,as one of the basic skills in English learning,can reflect learners’ ability of comprehensive use of language.However,the English writing situation remains unsatisfactory among nonEnglish major college students.It is very common that students lack the chance for English writing exercises and are anxious about English writing.Therefore,it is necessary for teachers to consider how to improve learners’ English writing proficiency and alleviate English writing anxiety.Comparative continuation,as a variant of continuation task,was proposed by Professor Wang Chuming(2016)so as to overcome the limitations of continuation task of unsatisfactory interactive alignment effect.Comparative continuation requires learners to read a complete text,and write a transition paragraph that summarizes the comparable points,then continue the writing in line with the points one by one.Learners must create novel content in comparison with the original text in their continuation,and the comparison can be either differences or similarities.The ending part is a commentary conclusion followed by the comparison,in which learners can express their opinions.However,as a newly proposed writing model,the studies on comparative continuation are relatively few.Thus,based on interactive alignment model and xu-argument,the present study aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the effects of comparative continuation on non-English major students’ English writing achievements?(2)What are the effects of comparative continuation on non-English major students’ writing performance in terms of complexity,accuracy and fluency?(3)What are the effects of comparative continuation on non-English major students’ English writing anxiety?The research subjects were 81 non-English major freshmen from a university in Lanzhou,who were majoring in physics from two parallel classes,and the research lasted for 15 weeks.The researcher randomly selected one class as the experimental class and the other as the control class.The research instrument consisted of SLWAI questionnaire,English writing tests,scoring criteria of writing and criteria for measure of complexity,accuracy and fluency.The research procedure was divided into three stages: before the experiment,all the students were asked to finish pre-test and pre-questionnaire.During the experiment,different writing teaching was conducted in two classes.For the experimental class,they were instructed by comparative continuation,and for the control class,they received the product approach.After the experiment,all the students were asked to finish post-test and post-questionnaire again.The data from all the questionnaires and tests were collected for quantitative analysis using SPSS 25.Major findings of the study are:(1)Comparative continuation can effectively improve learners’ English writing achievements.(2)Comparative continuation can significantly improve learners’ writing complexity and accuracy.In terms of writing fluency,there is no significant difference.(3)Comparative continuation can effectively reduce learners’ English writing anxiety,especially conceiving anxiety.This study puts forward some implications for English writing teaching.First,teachers should design the writing task with a combination of reading and writing,with the coupling of comprehension and production.Second,input influences output,so the topic and the difficulty of the source text should be taken into consideration.Finally,teachers should give guidance to students,helping students fully understand the source text in terms of content,language and organization.There are also several limitations in this study,for instance,the sample size is relatively small and the study period is relatively short.Future studies should enlarge the number of subjects and study period to improve reliability and validity of the results.