A Study Of The Effects Of Continuation Task In English Writing Performance Of Senior High School Students

Writing plays an important role in high school English teaching.In the national college entrance examination,writing accounts for a large proportion,that is from16% to 23%,but many students have difficulties in writing.In addition,the academic quality of the second level of the National English Curriculum(2017 version)requires students to be able to summarize the main content of the reading text or continue to write short essays after reading.This research is based on input theory,output theory,continuation theory and interactive alignment theory and aims to address the following questions:(1)Can the continuation task improve the fluency,accuracy and complexity of writing performance for senior high school students?(2)Does the continuation task help to transform the senior high students’ attitudes towards English writing?This study uses quantitative research methods to conduct experimental research on two classes of students in a senior high school in Nanning city,Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.Class 3 Grade 1 is the experimental group,and Class 1 Grade 1is the control group.The experimental period lasted for three months.During this period,both the experimental group and the control group had pre-test,post-test and writing training.However,the teaching method of writing is different.The continuation task is used in the experimental group for experimental training,while the traditional writing method is used in the control group for experimental training.Each composition written by each student was corrected by researcher and writing data was collected.The experimental group also completed the pre-test and post-test of the writing attitude questionnaire before and after the experiment,and the researcher collected the data in time and analyzed it.At the end of the experiment,the writing performance was divided into high,middle and low groups,and two students were selected from each group for semi-structured interviews to obtain a series of related qualitative data.Finally,the SPSS online software was used to analyze and compare the data before and after the experiment.Research shows:(1)The continuation task can improve fluency and accuracy of English writing performance.(2)The continuation task is beneficial to change the English writing attitudes of high school students towards English writing.This research provides a reference for the study of senior high school writing teaching,and is expected to increase teachers’ awareness of improving the quality of high school English writing by the continuation task,thereby promoting high school English writing teaching.This study also has some shortcomings such as short research time and small sample size,which needs to be improved in future studies.