The Application Of Continuation Task In Senior High School English Narrative Witing Teaching

Previous studies indicated that the introduction of Continuation Task into writing teaching could improve students’ writing as well as their comprehensive language competence.But up till now,very little literature can be found on distinguishing different genres in the process of Continuation Task.Narration is the most common and basic practice in high school English writing,and also a suitable genre used in Continuation Task.In order to better improve students’ narrative writing,based on the theory of alignment,input hypothesis and structural priming,this research tried to introduce Continuation Task into high school English narrative writing teaching,with due attention paid to the characteristics of the narration in the teaching process,to explore the influence of Continuation Task on high school students’ narrative writing competence.This research combined quantitative research and qualitative research.30 students from Class 8 Senior 2 of Xuzhou 36 th Middle School were chosen as the research subjects and an 8-week teaching experiment was carried out.The research aimed to find answers to the three questions:(1)What influence does Continuation Task have on the language richness of high school students’ English narrative writing?(2)What influence does Continuation Task have on the language accuracy of high school students’ English narrative writing?(3)What influence does Continuation Task have on the coherence of high school students’ English narrative writing?This research compared students’ narrative writing in the pre-test and the post-test.Before the experiment,a pre-test of narrative writing was performed to mark the students’ current narrative writing level.After that,a 6-week narrative Continuation Task teaching and training was conducted for the class,and then a post-test was conducted to observe the influence of Continuation Task on their language accuracy,richness and writing coherence.The software Coh-Metrix 3.0 was used to analyze the lexical richness and coherence of students’ writing,T-unit was used to quantify their sentence richness and language accuracy,and software Excel was used for data statistics and calculations.The results show that:(1)After six-time Continuation Task training,the vocabulary richness of students’ writing has increased,so has the total number of complex sentence patterns used in their writing,which proves that the language richness of students’ narrative writing has increased;(2)In terms of the language accuracy in their narrative writing,it showed that the error rate in students’ writing went down,and the accuracy of grammatical usage was significantly improved.It confirmed that the Continuation Task training improved the language accuracy of students’ narrative writing;(3)In terms of writing coherence,the language coherence and content coherence of students’ narrative writing were enhanced,among which the improvement of students’ content coherence was slightly higher than that of language coherence.Therefore,applying Continuation Task to the high school narrative writing teaching can not only help improve the quality of students’ narrative writing,but also open up a new path of education reform for high school English writing teaching.However,there still exist some shortcomings in this study.For example,the duration of the teaching experiment was shorter than expected,and the sample size was not large enough,which may lead to its weaker representativeness.In addition,the teaching process of Continuation Task can be further improved.Therefore,this research could be further developed and improved.