A Study On The Effects Of Interactive Instruction Task On Senior-high-school Students’ English Continuation Writing Proficiency

As one of important language skills,writing is widely used in various English examinations at home and abroad.Since 2016,Zhejiang Province has adopted reading-writing integrated continuation task as one of writing forms in English College Entrance Examination,and it has been employed in the National English College Entrance Examination in the past three years.How do teachers teach English writing especially reading-writing integrated continuation task effectively has drawn more and more scholars’ attention at home and abroad.Based on the common problems existing in current continuation task process,known as students’ lack of interest,shortage of language expression,and lack of coherence between continuation writing and given passage,this study adopts the theories of Interactive Alignment Model(IAM),from the perspective of interactive alignment,aiming to explore the effect of interactive instruction task on students’ English continuation writing proficiency.This study aims to answer these three questions: 1)Does interactive instruction task affect the linguistic accuracy and fluency of students’ English continuation writing? If yes,what specific effects does interactive instruction task exert on linguistic accuracy and fluency? 2)Does interactive instruction task affect the content of students’ English continuation writing? If yes,what specific effects does interactive instruction task exert on content? 3)Does interactive instruction task affect the organization of students’ English continuation writing? If yes,what specific effects does interactive instruction task exert on organization?The study mainly adopted methods of empirical experiment.The experiment subjects were 64 students,coming from two natural classes of grade two from a senior high school in Qingdao.During a 16 weeks’ experiment,traditional approach to teaching continuation task was adopted in the control group(CG);while interactive instruction tasks were designed and employed in the experiment group(EG)to guide students to interpret the given reading materials and conceive reasonable plots.Students in CG and EG were required to take a pretest,post-test and postponed test,aiming to observe whether students’ English continuation writing proficiency would transform after teaching experiment.This research adopted SPSS 23.0 to conduct descriptive statistics,Independent-Sample T-Test and Paired-Sample T-Test to acquire the results of experiment.Through content analysis of continuation writings in pretest and post-test of two students in EG,the research further explores the specific effects of interactive instruction tasks exerting on students’ English continuation writing proficiency from the perspectives of language,content and organization.The research results indicated the following findings.Firstly,viewed from the writing scores of post-test and postponed test,the scores of students in EG were much higher than those in CG.Secondly,viewed from linguistic dimension,interactive instruction tasks effectively reduced linguistic errors,improved linguistic accuracy and promoted the fluency of language expression.The promoting effect on linguistic accuracy was more apparent.Thirdly,interactive instruction tasks exerted positive effects on the content of students’ continuation writing.The concrete promoting effects mainly reflected in the following aspects,namely more abundant content,more reasonable plots and higher cohesion with the given reading materials.Eventually,interactive instruction tasks also exerted positive effects on the organization of students’ continuation writing,and the specific effect was to use linking words more appropriately for coherent organization.Based on the research results and literature review,the following teaching suggestions were put forward.Teachers are supposed to 1)instruct students to adopt semantic mapping to organize structure of the text;2)use interactive instruction tasks to analyze implications of the passage;3)provide key expressions as language scaffold to achieve linguistic alignment;4)provide various assessment to arouse students’ writing interest.Although this study shows some limitations,like relatively short time duration and lack of research samples,it can provide inspirations for improving teaching English writing in senior high schools,especially the quality of teaching continuation task and students’ writing competence.It will also lay a practical foundation for further research.