A Study Of The Influence Of Continuation-task On The Development Of College Students’ English Syntactic Complexity

Continuation-task(CT) is a newly-developed writing task aiming to enhance English learners’ reading and writing abilities. Learners are required to complete an article with its middle or ending parts being removed. As noticed by Wang(2012), CT has the potential to facilitate L2 learning. Up to now, however, no empirical studies have been reportedly done to examine the syntactic complexity development by doing the task. This thesis endeavors to study the syntactic complexity required of the writing learning, with the attempts to probe into the effectiveness of CT in developing students’ syntactic complexity of writing and the difference between CT and traditional writing teaching.Two parallel classes of sophomore from a university in Yunnan were recruited as Control Group(CG) and Experimental Group(EG). Pre-test, five training sessions and post-test were administered to the EG and CG respectively. Post-test was administered to test the effectiveness and differences through Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA) developed by Lu(2011). Among the 23 measures, nine measures were used to gauge the syntactic structures and 14 measures were used to assess the syntactic complexity. The Internet based corpus evaluation system Pigai.com was also put to used in this study. Data analyses found the following results:Firstly, the CT has no significant effect on the development of syntactic complexity in some measures. The results of post-test indicated that the p value of the 10 out of 14 syntactic complexity measurements were insignificant, while the rest four measures decreased in the post-test compared with the pre-test. However, eight out of nine syntactic structures increased, which means the CT has effect on the development of syntactic structures.Secondly, comparing the CT with the traditional writing task, two of nine syntactic structure measures, namely the W and VP, has significant difference.Among the 14 syntactic complexity measures, only one measure, the VP/T presented significant difference between CT and traditional writing task. Traditional writing task overtopped the CT in all these three measures.Thirdly, no significant difference between the CT and traditional writing task was found in high-proficiency learners in syntactic complexity development. Only C/T of the 23 measures showed significant difference. Despite all this, the mean deviation of EG to CG from the results of Pigai.com has narrowed from pre-test 4.24 to post-test0.85, which indicates that the CT has effect on the improvement of writing learning.Based on the results of the analyses, the author analyzed the reasons for the results theoretically and practically and proposed the suggestions for future study.