An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ Acquiring Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge

According to the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017),effective vocabulary instruction should prioritize the development of students’ lexical awareness within contextual frameworks,thereby enhancing their ability to comprehend and convey meaning through precise word usage,which raises higher requirements on the depth of students’ vocabulary knowledge.In response to this mandate,educators have sought innovative pedagogical strategies aimed at fostering students’ attention to the interplay between word collocation and expression and improving the depth of vocabulary knowledge.Drawing on the Input-Output Hypothesis and Interactive Alignment Theory,Professor Wang Chuming introduced the continuation task as an effective means of enhancing foreign language teaching efficiency.In recent years,scholars have made considerable progress in the research on the continuation task.However,the current research on the continuation task still focuses on the writing part,and although there are a few empirical studies showing the effectiveness of continuation task in enhancing vocabulary acquisition,research has not yet explored the depth of vocabulary knowledge in this area.Chinese Learner English Corpus analysis has identified frequent verb and adverb errors attributed to a lack of depth of vocabulary knowledge.Consequently,the research questions of this study were: 1)Compared with reading task,what is the effect of the continuation task on senior high school students’ acquiring the depth of verb knowledge? 2)Compared with reading task,what is the effect of the continuation task on senior high school students’ acquiring the depth of adverb knowledge?This study employs a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct experimental research.The experiment spanned a duration of ten weeks and involved a sample of 88 participants who were randomly selected from two parallel Grade One classes in a typical high school located in Shijiazhuang,Hebei Province.The research instruments include two tests of the depth of vocabulary knowledge and an interview.The test is chosen from Word Associates Test,which was proposed by Read in 1993.One of the classes was randomly designated as the experimental group,in which biweekly continuation tasks were employed,while the other class served as the control group,completing traditional reading tasks.Both groups were given a pre-test to assess their initial depth of vocabulary knowledge,and a post-test was administered to measure the level of depth of vocabulary knowledge attained by both groups following the experiment.Meanwhile,at the end of the experiment,the author chose 12 students from experimental class to collect more qualitative data The data obtained from the study was analyzed using SPSS 23.0software.By analyzing the data and interview,the findings reveal that: 1)compared with reading task,the continuation task has a positive effect on the improvement of students’ depth of verb knowledge,while the collocation effect is better than meaning.2)compared with reading task,the continuation task has a positive effect on the improvement of students’ depth of adverb knowledge,while the collocation effect is better than meaning.This study contributes to the extant literature on the continuation task and the depth of vocabulary knowledge,providing novel insights for vocabulary instruction.