An Action Research On The Continuation Task On Senior High School English Writing

English writing is an important skill of language output.It features prominently in English teaching in senior high schools.Reading is an essential source of input.The process of input and output is mutually reciprocal.However,teachers often teach reading and writing separately.The National English Curriculum for Senior High School(2017,revised in 2020)clearly puts forward that story continuation may be one of the ways to test students’ writing ability.Some studies have shown that the continuation task has a washback effect on teaching for senior high school teachers,and it also gives enlightenment for writing.The continuation task is a tool for test,and it’s also a teaching method.It’s expected that the interaction between reading and writing can stimulate students to output,and cultivate students’ ability to use language comprehensively.Based on Input Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Interactive Alignment,this research took 54 senior one students in a senior high school in Huizhou,Guangdong province as research subjects,attempting to apply the continuation task on senior high school English writing for twelve weeks.At the beginning of the action,pre-test,questionnaire,and interview were conducted on the students.The author found out some problems in student’s writing,such as the problems in vocabulary and grammar,single expressions,negative attitude,low interest,lack of coherence and so on.For the problems,the author made an action plan.After two rounds of action research,SPSS 25 was used to perform paired sample T-test for the data of pretest and post-test.The questionnaire results were compared and analyzed.Finally,interview results were collected and sorted out.This study attempts to explore the following two questions:(1)During the process of two-round actions,how to effectively apply the continuation task on senior high school English writing?(2)After two-round actions,what are the changes of students’ writing ability,writing attitude,and writing interest?After two rounds of action research,the results show that the effective teaching steps of the continuation task can be concluded: Read-Think-Improve-Write-Evaluate.“Read” is “read for content and clues”.“Think” is “conceive plots” and “list outline”.“Improve” is “perfect details” and “improve language”.“Write” is “continuation writing”.“Evaluate” is “demonstrate before evaluation”,“peer-evaluation”,“self-evaluation”,and “teacher evaluation after class”.After the first-round action,the author found that students still had some problems in language expressions and coherence.To solve the problems,the author added the “Improve” step,including appreciation and imitation,making use of transitions,detail perfection and so on in the second round of action research.2.After two rounds of action research on the continuation task,the result came out:(1)Students’ writing ability had been improved.It reflected on the use of advanced expressions;reduction of grammar mistakes;high awareness of transitions and framework;improvement of coherence and relation to the theme.(2)Students’ attitude towards writing has been changed.They were active in class and interacted well with the teacher.(3)Students’ interest in writing has been increased.They interacted well with reading materials,which motivated them to write.Besides,this research summarizes the pedagogical enlightenment on the continuation task,such as designing the effective teaching steps according to students’ situation,guiding students to accumulate and use writing materials,providing right contexts for students and so on.