An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of Attributive Clauses

Grammar plays an important role in high school English learning.The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 Edition,2020 Revised)advocates a three-dimensional dynamic teaching concept of English grammar,which is “form-meaning-use” oriented by language application.Teachers should provide students with rich context in practical activities to understand and use grammar knowledge,and cultivate students’ awareness and ability of grammar learning.Attributive clause is the key and difficult point in grammar teaching,so it is of great significance to explore new ways to break through the difficulty.The researches have shown that reading-writing integrated tasks are of great importance to promote language learning.Continuation task and summary writing have become a hot topic in academic research,and some provinces have adopted the two tasks as the content of college entrance examination.The continuation task combines comprehension and output to improve students’ comprehensive language ability,which is in line with the three-dimensional dynamic English grammar teaching concept.Therefore,this study applied continuation task to the teaching of attributive clauses in senior high school,and discussed their effects on the acquisition by comparing with summary writing.The main purpose of this study is to explore the influence of two reading and writing tasks on senior high school students’ understanding and production of attributive clauses,and the influence of two reading and writing tasks on senior high school students’ acquisition of different types of attributive clauses.This study selected 99 students from two parallel classes in a senior high school in Shi Jiazhuang,Hebei Province and randomly chose a class as the experimental class(EC),the other is the control class(CC).EC adopted continuation task while CC adopted summary writing.Before the experiment,the two classes were tested,and the results were not significantly different in the acquisition of attributive clauses.In the experiment,two classes completed eight writing tasks and relevant data were collected.After the experiment,the two classes were tested immediately,and six students from each class were randomly selected for interview.Then SPSS 23.0 was used to analyze the collected data.The results showed that:(1)The continuation task and summary writing are helpful to the senior high school students’ understanding of the attributive clauses.Compared with summary writing,continuation task is more effective.(2)Both continuation task and summary writing help students produce attributive clauses,but the effect of continuation task is more significant.(3)Both continuation task and summary writing are helpful to the learning of restrictive attributive clauses and non-restrictive attributive clauses.No matter what type of attributive clause,the effect of continuation task is better than summary,especially on the acquisition of restrictive attributive clauses.There is no significant difference between the two types of attributive clauses in summary writing.This study finds that continuation task is more helpful to senior high school students’ acquisition of attributive clauses than summary writing.It’s a useful exploration to promote grammar learning and also provides a reference for the relevant study of continuation task and summary writing.