An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Textual Enhancement On Senior High School Students’ Syntactic Complexity In The Continuation Task

Writing is one of the key language skills required to be developed according to China’s General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition,2020 Revision).It is an important representation of students’ comprehensive language output ability.Syntactic complexity,referring to the syntactic structures and the degree of sophistication of these structures,is a significant dimension in determining language learners’ writing proficiency.The continuation task is considered a writing approach that effectively facilitates second language learning.When learners read the input materials,the interaction between the learners and the materials generates the alignment effect,encouraging learners to imitate and reuse the linguistic structures of the original text in their continuation writing.In recent years,the continuation task has been added as a writing part of the National College Entrance Examination.Although research has been conducted to investigate the facilitating effects of the continuation task on various aspects of foreign language learning,few studies have examined the effects of textual enhancement as a writing condition for the continuation task on the syntactic complexity of senior high school students.To fill the research gap,the present study aims to investigate two research questions:(1)Are there differences in the effects of the continuation task with and without textual enhancement on senior high school students’ syntactic complexity? If any,what are the differences?(2)Are there differences in the effects of textual enhancement on the syntactic complexity in the continuation task for high-achieving and low-achieving senior high school students? If any,what are the differences?This study adopted the experimental method,enrolling a total of 99 students from two parallel classes in the second year of Y Senior High school in Jiangmen City,Guangdong Province.Among the participants,50 students were in the experimental group(EG),while 49 students were in the control group(CG).Prior to the experiment,the participants from both groups underwent a pre-test.In the experiment,the CG was required to complete the continuation task without textual enhancement,while the EG was given the same task with textual enhancement.Each participant was required to complete four treatment writing tasks.After the experiment,all participants underwent a post-test.Furthermore,the EG completed a questionnaire,and six high-and low-achieving subjects were interviewed.The written texts of the pre-test and post-test of all participants were collected and transcribed into electronic versions and analyzed through L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer.Finally,all data were entered into SPSS 23.0 for statistical analysis.The results of the study revealed two main findings:(1)The EG significantly outperformed CG in the development of length of production unit and coordination.This indicates that the continuation task with textual enhancement significantly promotes senior high school students’ syntactic complexity in writing.(2)High-achieving students showed significant improvement in three dimensions—length of production unit,subordination,and coordination,whereas low-achieving students showed significant improvement only in length of production unit and coordination.This finding suggests that textual enhancement had varying effects on the syntactic complexity in the continuation task for high-achieving and low-achieving senior high school students.The highachieving students showed more development in this regard.The findings of this study provide practical guidance for English teaching practices in senior high school.Firstly,textual enhancement is suitable for the continuation task in senior high school English teaching and can produce a significant facilitating effect.Secondly,since the development of syntactic complexity is not synchronized between high-and low-achieving students,teachers can employ text enhancement in a targeted way to encourage students to use complex structures.Finally,when evaluating students’ performance in the continuation task,teachers should focus on syntactic variety and complexity and take a more tolerant attitude toward grammatical errors resulting from the use of complex structures.