Effect Of Continuation Task On High School Students’ English Writing Achievements And Writing Coherence

In high school English teaching,writing teaching is a very crucial and challenging part.Despite the fact that teachers pay great attention to writing teaching,learners’ writing ability hasn’t been significantly improved.And writing coherence is an important factor in evaluating learners’ writing.Traditional topic writing can’t make a significant influence on learners’ writing coherence.Since Wang Chuming(2012)proposed continuation task,more and more researches have confirmed that reading combined with writing can effectively promote learners’ learning of second language and enhance learners’ writing ability.Continuation task,a new type of college entrance examination question,made its debut in October 2016 in the Zhejiang English college entrance examination paper.With the increase in the number of provinces participating in the new round of college entrance exams,this type of writing is getting more and more attention from teachers and students.Therefore,this study intends to explore the effect of continuation task on learners’ writing achievements and writing coherence in high school.Based on the theory of input hypothesis,output hypothesis and interaction alignment theory,combining with previous research results on continuation task,this study intends to answer the following two questions:(1)What is the effect of continuation task on high school students’ writing achievements?(2)What is the effect of continuation task on high school students’ writing coherence?This study is conducted in two classes which were randomly selected as experiment subjects in a high school in Zaozhuang,Shandong Province.Topic writing teaching method was used in the control class and the continuation task teaching method was used in the experimental class to explore the effect of continuation task on high school students’ English writing achievements and writing coherence.After collecting and analyzing the relevant data by using Coh-Metrix software and SPSS 25.0,the main findings of this study are shown as follows:First,continuation task can improve high school students’ writing achievements.In continuation tasks,students can obtain input of reading materials and then learn the structural input.In the interaction between students and reading materials,students can imitate the tense and grammar in the original sentence to make their writing fluent and logical,then making students’ writing achievements improved.Second,continuation task can improve high school students’ writing coherence.The index of argument overlap,stem overlap and LSA among all sentences are all higher than pretest after ten weeks’ continuation task teaching.Under the influence of flattening effect,students can consciously make their writing coherent and harmonious with the original text,bring into correspondence with the original argument.By imitating the original text and creating the content with imagination,students’ ability to organize the layout of the writing is improved,thus making students’ writing coherence enhanced.This study explores the effect of continuation task on high school students’ writing achievements and writing coherence,which can provide some inspiration and guidance for high school teachers’ English teaching and high school students’ English writing,laying a practical foundation for further study in this field.Nevertheless,there is still some limitation in this study,such as the short experiment time and small sample size.So,it is essential to properly prolong the experiment time and enlarge the sample size to make future study more universal and applicable.