An Experimental Research Of Effects Of Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ Use Of Cohesive Devices In English Writing

The English compositions of senior high school students generally lack textual cohesion and coherence,and their overall consciousness of concatenating text as a whole is relatively weak.Continuation task is a writing method that combines reading with writing,comprehension with production,and its effect on promoting language learning has been widely verified.Therefore,this study adopts the continuation task,combines the interactive alignment model and cohesion theory,to explore the effects of continuation task on the use of cohesive devices in senior high school students’ writing.The two research questions are as follows:(1)What are the effects of continuation task on the use of cohesive devices in senior high school students’ writing?(2)What factors affect the use of cohesive devices in senior high school students’ continuation writing?In this study,70 students from two parallel classes of a senior high school in Guangdong Province were selected as participants during the 10-week experiment.The continuation tasks were adopted in the experimental class and the topic writing tasks were adopted in the control class.Based on the statistics and analysis of the collected students’ composition texts,this study draws the following conclusions:Continuation task has positive effects on improving students’ use of cohesive devices which is embodied in the frequency and the ratio of different types of cohesive devices.To be specific,the continuation task can improve the frequency of reference,conjunction and lexical cohesion,but it does not affect substitution and ellipsis.Meanwhile,the continuation task also helps students increase the proportion of some sub-items of cohesive devices,such as pronominals,addictive conjunction,causal conjunction,synonym,hyponymy;and reduces repetition.The main influencing factor that leads to the positive effect of continuation task on students’ cohesive devices lies in the interaction and coordination between students’ continuation writing and the original text.In this process,students will take the initiative to retrace the original text,thus increasing the interaction between comprehension and production by coordinating language level and situational patterns;therefore,students will repeat and imitate the cohesive devices used in the original text.Moreover,the composition genre in the continuation task is mainly narratives with complex plots and vivid language,which provides a sample for students and also plays a positive role in enriching students’ types of cohesive devices.Therefore,teachers can apply continuation task to daily writing teaching and training as a way to improve the frequency of cohesive devices and the writing quality of senior high school students;but it is necessary to further explore how to improve the use of substitution and ellipsis in continuation task.