Study On Effects Of Collaborative Continuation Task On High School Students’ English Writing

As one of the four basic skills of English learning,writing can effectively promote the internalization and assimilation of language knowledge.The General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards（2017 Edition,2020 Revision）put forward new requirements for the writing ability of senior high school students.Teachers should attach importance to the cultivation of micro-writing skills,including the ability to construct,outline and revise in writing teaching.To achieve this goal,teachers can design pre-reading and post-reading discussion activities or employ summary writing and continuation task to avoid lonely single-skill training.Therefore,teaching English writing in senior high school should not be limited to training writing skills but put emphasis on the cultivation of comprehensive skills.As two primary directions of current writing study,collaborative writing and continuation task,the combination of the two can effectively enhance students’English writing proficiency.However,there are not many relevant studies on the integration of collaborative writing and continuation task.Therefore,the study attempts to explore the effectiveness of Collaborative Continuation Task in English writing teaching by applying collaborative writing to continuation task in teaching English writing.The study is based on theories such as Interactive Alignment Model,Continuation Theory,Input and Output Theory and Collaborative Learning Theory.Research questions are as follows:1)Compared with Individual Continuation Task,what are the effects of Collaborative Continuation Task on alignment at the levels of lexis and syntactic structure levels in senior high school students’compositions?2)Compared with Individual Continuation Task,what are the effects of Collaborative Continuation Task on language errors in senior high school students’compositions?3)What are the effects of Collaborative Continuation Task on English writing scores of students with different English levels?Eighty participants in Grade Two in senior high school were randomly selected from two parallel classes in Lingtai County,Pingliang City as the research subjects.During the three-month teaching treatment,the experimental class carried out Collaborative Continuation Task,while the control class carried out Individual Continuation Task.Before and after the teaching experiment,students in two classes were required to complete“the Continuation Task”selected from“the 21^st Century Education Network”,whose scores were used in the pre-test and post-test respectively.When students completed the continuation task,all compositions were collected to analyze the effectiveness of Collaborative Continuation Task and Individual Continuation Task,which were finished by the author and the other teacher in this school.To explore the synergistic effect,two small corpora were established by using Ant Conc 4.0.4 statistical analysis.To analyze the frequency of language errors,two teachers marked language errors made in two corpora from six aspects,including the misuse of number agreement,article misuse,linking verb misuse,tense misuse,infinitive verb misuse and Chinglish.SPSS 24 was used for statistical analysis of students’scores of different English levels in collaborative continuation class.The experimental results were as follows:1)Compared with Individual Continuation Task,there were stronger synergistic effects in the lexis and syntactic structure in Collaborative Continuation Task.2)Compared with Individual Continuation Task,Collaborative Continuation Task could significantly reduce the error rate of number agreement,article,tense and Chinglish in students’writing compositions,but there was no significant difference in reducing the error rate of linking verbs and infinitive verbs.3)Collaborative Continuation Task had different effects on students’writing achievement of with different English levels.For students with lower English level,Collaborative Continuation Task could significantly improve their writing scores.However,for students with higher English level,there were few significant effects in students’writing scores.This study has some pedagogical implications for high school English writing teaching.In future English writing teaching,teachers can combine collaborative writing with continuation task so as to increase the level and intensity of interaction in continuation task and eventually enhance the synergistic effect and reduce the language error rate.