An Empirical Study On The Competence Of Post-Reading Sequel Writing Tasks Elicited By Translation Skills Of Senior High School Students

At the call of reform on College Entrance Examination writing-reform,a new type of exam item-the post-reading sequel writing was adopted in the new College Entrance Examination for English in Zhejiang,Shandong and Jiangsu provinces in 2020.The content of passage written by the examinee is required to be logically connected with the materials provided with reasonable plots.At the same time,this type of exam advocates the integration of reading and writing,which is an integration of language imitation(input)and creative writing(output).However,if the learners only develop the sequel writing with their own interests,ideas and imagination,the content and language of the sequel story will be greatly different from the original one.In terms of sentence patterns,most learners tend to use simple sentences with low complexity and syntactic differences are great from the original text.So they need an intervene between the input and output process.The purpose of this study is to prove that the application of translation skills can improve the post-reading sequel writing ability of senior high school students through empirical research.Based on the input-output theory,this thesis analyzes the English post-reading sequel writing of senior high school students in detail.It is expected to help high school English teachers and students recognize the feasibility of applying translation skills to post-reading sequel writing based on 16 weeks’ teaching experiment.Then data collected from the experiment will be analyzed and discussed to show whether the thesis statement is true or false,from the respects of students’ language quality and levels in post-reading sequel writings.This thesis attempts to answer the following questions:1.What are the effects of the translation skills on improving those problems in the sequel writing in senior high school?2.How to use this translation skills to improve the sequel writing in senior high school?In this study,70 students from two parallel classes of Grade 3 at Zaozhuang Experimental High School of Shandong Province were selected as the research objects,and the experiment in English sequel writing lasted for 16 weeks which includes quantitative and qualitative research.The research tools are a questionnaire survey on the usage of translation skills,two sequel writing tests,an interview,and a composition evaluation form of the post-reading sequel writing.In order to make a more scientific and comprehensive analysis of the above questions,this thesis will mainly use the experimental method and interview method,and at the same time,questionnaire survey method and other research methods,on the basis of empirical research to carry out theoretical induction and summary.Then,the collected data on sequel writing scores are analyzed and compared with SPSS.At the beginning of the sequel writing experiment,the average scores of the experimental class were 12.94 and the controlled class were13.00 in the pretest.After sixteen weeks later,the average scores of the sequel writing experiment for the experimental class were 17.34 and the controlled class were 13.6 in the post-test.Therefore,the experimental class has significant improvement in performance of the sequel writing,but the controlled class has no significant change after the experiment.The research found that: first of all,the most important problems to be solved in the current sequel writing are students’ Chinglish mistakes.Secondly,consciously cultivating translation skills for learners is a good way to improve their output ability in sequel writing.What’s more,the intervention of word-to-word translation,syntactic translation and text translation,that is,the usage of translation skills,can promote the internal construction of thinking for the sequel writing.It can make language output more coordinated,accurate,fluent and complex.So we could use translation skills to improve the students’ word accuracy,sentence beauty,and the text cohesion,so that their sequel writing competence will be improved.But translation skills have little effect on the logic cohesion of the sequel writing.The author hopes that through the research of this thesis,teachers and students in senior high school can understand the importance of the usage of translation skills in the usage of post-reading sequel writing,and provide some enlightenment for the improvement of students’ post-reading sequel writing.At the same time,teachers should not only pay attention to the usage of students’ translation skills in sequel writing,but also pay attention to the improvement of their own comprehensive translation skills and bilingual awareness through sequel writing.