A Study On Improving Senior High School Students Continuation Writing Competence Through Reading English Novels

As English teaching reform deepens in China,the new curriculum standard raises the requirement for students’ writing ability,which leads to a shift in high school teaching focus to an emphasis on both reading and writing.Since 2016,Chinese nationwide college entrance exams have gradually introduced a writing task called“continuation writing”,which raises higher requirements for students’ writing ability.However,students without adequate vocabulary and rich humanistic knowledge will find it challenging to understand the content of the writing prompt.It has been suggested by Wang Chuming(2019)that reading English novels is helpful for improving “continuation writing” ability as some words or sentences are repeated in lengthy works.This paper focuses on the current context of high school writing in the new Chinese college entrance exam and adopts an experimental research method to conduct empirical teaching research in the English writing teaching practice at the high school level.This study mainly discusses the following two questions:(1)How do we apply English novel reading to the practical teaching of continuation writing?(2)What is the effect of English novel reading on the attitude and level of high school students’ continuation writing?A total of 136 students from the 11 th and 12 th grades of a high school in Hebei Province were selected as the research objects,with the experiment lasting for one semester.The control group adopted traditional English writing teaching methods,while the experimental group used English novel reading teaching methods.Pre and post-experiment tests,questionnaires,and interviews were used to gather data.Analyses of the data revealed that English novel reading could be applied to the practical teaching of “continuation writing” with good learning outcomes.English novel reading can improve students’ writing ability in “coherence and cohesion” “logicality” “cohesion”“vocabulary and grammar” and overall continuation writing scores.Moreover,English novel learning can change students’ learning attitudes towards “continuation writing”,increase their learning enthusiasm,and help them to overcome their fear of reading long novels,improving their writing and English learning habits,and achieving better learning outcomes.