An Experimental Study Of Continuation Task On The Teaching Of English Writing For Senior High School Students

English writing has always played an important role in the college entrance examination.Because 25 points has been assigned to English writing in the examination,the scores on English writing has a great impact on students’ final examination results.Therefore,both high school teachers and students attach high importance to English writing.In order to get higher marks in English writing,students were eager to master some writing skills and methods about writing.In recent years,teachers have tried different ways to help students improve their writing skills,such as reciting passages,applying complicated sentence patterns,using abstract vocabulary,etc.,but most of these methods pay too much attention to the training of words and grammar,and neglect the fundamental way of English learning,which is the combination of language input and output.The result of this kind of mechanical training is that the students are confused and gradually lose interest in English writing.Professor Wang Chuming in2012 proposed the "Continuation Task" method for writing.This method effectively combines the process of language input and output,and stimulates students’ motivation to write in English.Under this method,students who do not know how to write a composition by a given topic,can express themselves in some way according to the article,and thus gradually improve their English writing ability.The study tries to introduce this method to high school English writing,and to test the effectiveness of this method.The purpose of this study is to answer two questions:(1)Can the method of Continuation Task improve students’ writing ability?(2)If it works,is it related to students’ learning motivation? If not,why? The author chose students from Class 3 and Class 4,Grade One of the high school of Yuanyang county as the object of research.The result of the pre-test of the English writing level of the students in the two classes,showed that the students are about the same writing level.The two classes are parallel.The author randomly set Class 3 as the Control Class,and Class 4 as the Experimental Class.In the experimental class,the author adopts the Continuation Task to teach their English writing,and in control class,the author use traditional English writing teaching methods(topic-given composition).The author conducted a 16-week teaching experiment.After this experiment,the author collected data from tests,questionnaires and interviews and use SPSS for data analysis.The findings show that:(1)Continuation task can effectively improve students’ English writing ability.After applying continuation task,students’ language ability obviously improved: they can use right words and write complex sentences with little grammar mistakes;what’s more,they can write a composition in a logical order.(2)Continuation task can enhance students’ interest in writing,stimulate their learning motivation,so as to improve their writing ability.The traditional teaching method frighten students away from writing,and turn writing into a boring and difficult task.After applying continuation task,students have obviously changed their attitudes towards English writing,and show their interests and confidence in English writing.This study provides a richer theoretical basis and professional guidance for English writing teaching in senior high schools.