An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of Iterative Continuation On Lexical Chunks In Senior High School English Writing

Continuation task requires students to firstly read the reading material carefully and then employ their imagination and creatively complete the ending of the original text.This method of promoting English learning was proposed by Professor Wang Chuming in 2012.The reform of the writing task in college entrance examinations has made both students and teachers pay more attention to continuation task.In 2018,Professor Wang proposed “Iterative Continuation” as a variant of continuation task.Besides,lexical chunks,as the minimum unit of language input,memory,storage and output,play an important role in language use and English writing teaching.This study is an experimental study,which mainly explores the effect of iterative continuation task on English lexical chunks in senior high school.To do the further study of the effect of iterative continuation task,the study analyzed lexical chunks from three dimensions,fluency,accuracy and diversity.The subjects were two parallel classes of Grade two,selected from a high school in Baoding,Hebei Province.Before the experiment,in order to ensure a scientific and accurate experiment,the composition test in the Nation College Entrance Examination in 2018 was employed as pre-test.According to the results of fluency,accuracy and diversity of lexical chunks in students’ compositions,sixty participants were selected from two parallel classes as the experimental participants and randomly divided into experimental class and control class.Two classes were equivalent,with thirty students in each class.The experiment lasted for 12 weeks and writing task was conducted every two weeks.The experimental class carried out iterative continuation task,while the control class used summary writing task.After the experiment,the composition tests in the National College Entrance Examination in 2019 were distributed to test whether iterative continuation task had a positive impact on the mastery of lexical chunks among senior high school students.After the experiment,data analysis was performed through SPSS 19.0 and EXCEL,and the following conclusions were obtained:(1)Iterative continuation task can improve the fluency of high school students’ use of lexical chunks,which is more significant than summary writing task.(2)Compared with summary writing task,in terms of improving theaccuracy of the use of lexical chunks by high school students,there is no obvious advantage in iterative continuation task.(3)Iterative continuation task can effectively improve the diversity of lexical chunks,which is better than summary writing task.The pedagogical implications of this research are as follow: First,teachers should select appropriate reading materials that are not too difficult for senior high school students and have interesting content.Second,before carrying out the iterative continuation task,teachers should help students make adequate preparations,like explaining the writing process and advantages of it and helping students to understand the reading text.Third,teachers should teach lexical chunks systematically to students,and remind students to pay attention to and imitate those lexical chunks in the original reading material.