Effects Of The Continuation Task On The Learning Of English Articles

English articles are the grammatical items that are highly involved in language use,but they are difficult to be fully mastered by Chinese foreign language learners(Yan 2003).The current study compared the article scores of two classes which conducted the reading task and the continuation task respectively to further investigate the effects of continuation task on the learning of English article.The study adopted the empirical experiment,the interview and also the questionnaire was involved to investigate the effects of continuation task on article studies among the Chinese senior high school students.Moreover,the learners’ English learning motivation and English level those two aspects were taken into consideration to further probe into their relationship with the effects.The 65 participants were selected from a senior high school and divided into two classes: a continuation class and a reading class.The experiment was lasted about sixteen weeks,and the research instruments include the latest final-term examination,two article tests,an English learning motivation questionnaire and an interview.The current research adopted SPSS 11.0 to further analyze the quantitative data that obtained from the tests in terms of the two perspectives,the English level and the English learning motivation.At the same time,the data of interview were transcribed into the text and were used as the qualitative support for the study results.Results revealed that: 1)the continuation task could significantly facilitate the English article learning of high-level and low-level English learners but it couldn’t significantly improve the article learning of middle-level learners;2)learners’ English language learning motivation didn’t show any obvious influence on the effectiveness of continuation task;3)the effects of continuation task were superior to reading task.Besides,reading task was not an efficient facilitator of article learning.The research yields some beneficial implications for the development of the continuation task and article teaching.First of all,getting some pre-writing training before the performance of the continuation task.For instance,Wang(2006)proposed that students could write some reflections at first to cultivate their writing interests.Secondly,exploring the forms of the interpersonal interaction to enhance the alignment.Thirdly,the teachers should teach the grammatical rules of the articles systematically and remind the learners to notice the exceptions.In a word,the results of the study can provide empirical evidence for the continuation effects and give suggestions for article teaching.However,the current research have its own limitations.First,whether the effect of the continuation task on the English article study could last for a long time had not been tested.Second,the participants was only selected in the learners whose native language is Chinese.Third,to what extent of the interactions exist in the continuation task could benefit the learning process most is still unknown.And the study results need further verification.