Effects Of The Enhanced Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Quality

This study was undertaken to explore the effects of the enhanced continuation task on senior high school students’ English writing quality in terms of content,organization and language.Its theoretical bases are input hypothesis,output hypothesis,interactive alignment theory and noticing hypothesis.Its significance is to provide teachers with an effective method of teaching the continuation task and enable students to notice these enhanced parts,laying the foundation for the following continuation.The research questions in this study are as follows:1.What effects does the enhanced continuation task have on English writing quality in terms of content?2.What effects does the enhanced continuation task have on English writing quality in terms of organization?3.What effects does the enhanced continuation task have on English writing quality in terms of language?Altogether 80 students participated in the study,who were from two eleventh-grade classes in a high school of Xinghua,Jiangsu Province.The instrument of the experiment was the writing test.The treatment involved three steps.Students were first asked to familiarize themselves with the enhanced parts:the underlined characters,plot and setting;then tried to think about the connections between the enhanced parts and the continuation task;and finally continued to write based on the consistency of characters,plot and setting.The data were collected and scored by two teachers.The data were analyzed with SPSS by employing independent samples T-tests to find whether there was a significanct difference between the two classes in terms of content,organization and language.After the experiment,six students,representing high,middle and low achievers,were interviewed about the reasons for the effects.The study has yielded the following major findings.Firstly,the enhanced continuation task has a positive effect on senior high school students’English writing quality in terms of content.Quantitatively,the means in the EC and the CC are 22.03 and 21.15 respectively with the p value at 0.033,indicating that there is a significant difference between them.Qualitatively,in the enhanced continuation task,students use the underlined content more,including main characters,time and place,etc.And the enhanced content provides ideas for their continuation,making the content more reasonable.The main reason for this finding is that students can notice the underlined content and do more thinking about the key elements by means of enhancement.Secondly,the enhanced continuation task improves senior high school students’ English writing quality in terms of organization（p=.016<.05）.Qualitatively,in the enhanced continuation task,students’ control of the organization of the text is more pertinent and the direction of the plot is more rational and diversified,making the continuation of the text more consistent,coherent and well-structured.This finding is due to the fact that students can speculate on the development of the plot based on the underlined clues,which is in line with Pickering and Garrod’s（2004）claim that "alignment is created in interaction".Finally,the enhanced continuation task is positively effective on senior high school students’ English writing quality in terms of language.In the experiment,the mean value of EC and CC is 28.45 and 27.38 respectively with the p value at 0.037,lower than 0.05.Although the score of language improves a little,there is still a difference between CC and EC.The interviews show that in the continuation task,students are more accurate in their command of the language of the story,including the language of the characters,the language of the plot and the language of the setting,making the language of the continuation more accurate and consistent with the previous text.This is because underlining,as a means of enhancement,makes students pay close attention to the underlined content,think about it and use it,consistent with the view advocated by Wang Chuming（2010）that "language output is aligned to input".This study provides some implications.Firstly,teachers should be able to select the enhanced content accurately and effectively,including characters,plot,setting and theme.Secondly,teachers can provide appropriate guidance to students,directing their attention to the content,organization and language of the reading material.Finally,teachers can select interesting,comprehensible and well-structured texts for their students during the teaching process,in order to promote the effectiveness of continuation.