A Study On The Application Of The Continuation Task To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

According to the General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards（2017）,language skills such as listening,speaking,reading,viewing and writing are important parts of language application ability.Writing plays an important role in high school English learning and teaching.However,the current situation of English writing in China is not optimistic.Due to poor language organization ability and expression ability,students lack interest and motivation in writing,resulting in low writing efficiency and stagnant writing level.At the same time,the separation of input and output in English writing teaching and the lack of writing context are also the difficulties that English writing teaching in senior high school is facing.Therefore,how to adopt effective writing teaching methods in English writing teaching,how to enhance students’ writing ability and interest,and how to improve students’ writing attitude and solve the problems remained to be addressed.In order to solve the above problems in writing teaching,Wang Chuming and other experts put forward the continuation task,which combines reading with writing,creating context by reading input materials to helps students with writing output.The method of continuation task has attracted the attention of scholars in the field of foreign language teaching.Recent years,with the promotion of the new college entrance examination,some provinces in China have included the continuation task into the scope of the college entrance examination.Therefore,this writing method has attracted the attention of educators once again.However,in the current situation,the application of continuation task is mainly limited to college English writing,while its application research in senior high school English writing is relatively few and incomplete.Based on the input hypothesis,output hypothesis and interaction alignment theory,this research explores the effects of continuation task on senior high school students’ English writing attitude and writing ability through a 16-week teaching experiment.In this research,a total of 90 students from two parallel classes of Grade 2 in the researcher’s school were selected as the subjects.Class 1 of Grade 2 was randomly selected as the experimental class and Class 2 of the same grade as the control class.In the experimental class,the teaching method of continuation task was adopted;while in the control class,the traditional proposition writing method was adopted.And the teaching experiment conducted by questionnaire survey,test method and interview method,aims to explore the following two questions:（1）what is the effect of continuation task on the English writing attitude of senior high school students?（2）What is the effect of continuation task on the English writing ability of senior high school students? Before the experiment,the researcher conducted a test on the students of the experimental class and the control class to ensure that there was no significant difference in the English writing level of the two classes.After the experiment,SPSS25.0 and Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer（L2SCA）were used to analyze and discuss the research data,and the following conclusions were drawn:（1）To a certain extent,the writing teaching method of continuation task improves students’ attitude towards high school English writing,and students are more inclined to accept the continuation task method compared with the traditional proposition writing method.（2）Compared with traditional proposition writing,continuation task can significantly improve the syntactic complexity of high school students’ English writing,which is reflected in the significant difference in syntactic complexity between the experimental class and the control class.That is to say,the sentence patterns of students in the experimental class are more complex.（3）The method of continuation task can improve students’ writing performance to a certain degree,which can be shown from the writing performance of the experimental class in the post-test.This research explores the effects of the continuation task on the attitude and writing ability of senior high school students.In addition,it also verifies the effectiveness of the continuation task in senior high school English writing teaching,and provides new ideas and methods for senior high school English writing teaching.