An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Continuation Task On Syntactic Complexity Of Senior High School Students’ English Writing

The General Senior High English Curriculum Standards(2017 edition,2020 revised version)points out that language skills are an essential part of language application ability,and writing ability is an important aspect of language skills.Moreover,syntactic complexity is not only the crucial indicator for measuring students’ writing ability but also the weakness of students’ writing.Therefore,it is important to explore more effective methods to improve the syntactic complexity of students’ writing.Professor Wang Chuming(2012)proposed an effective teaching method--The continuation task,which combines language imitation and creative use to improve students’ foreign languages learning ability.Great achievements have been achieved in the research of the continuation task.However,there are relatively few studies related to the effect of continuation task on the syntactic complexity of English writing.Therefore,based on the hypothesis of input and output and the theory of interaction alignment theory,the study explores the effect of the continuation task on the syntactic complexity of senior high school students’ English writing.This thesis attempts to answer the four research questions:(1)What is the effect of continuation task on the length of production unit of senior high school students’ English writing?(2)What is the effect of continuation task on the amount of coordination of senior high school students’ English writing?(3)What is the effect of continuation task on the amount of subordination of senior high school students’ English writing?(4)What is the effect of continuation task on the particular structure of senior high school students’ English writing?The experiment lasted for 8 weeks.109 students from two natural classes in Grade 1 of Shenzhou Senior High School in Hebei Province,were selected as the experimental subjects.The EC adopted the continuation task,and the CC adopted topic writing.The reading materials were selected from the English textbook of senior high school,(Compulsory 1,Hebei Education Press),and the test papers are based on the 2020 and 2021 joint examinations of six counties and districts in Shijiazhuang City,with high reliability and validity.The experimental data of pre-test and the post-test were collected and analyzed from the four dimensions of the syntactic complexity(the length of the production unit,the amount of coordination,the amount of subordination,particular structure)with the help of the second language syntactic complexity analyzer(L2SCA).At the same time,SPSS 25.0 was used for independent sample T-test and statistical analysis.Finally,eight students were selected from EC as interviewees,and the data of the interview was used as the complementary for the data analysis and discussion.The research results show that:(1)The continuation task promotes the length of production unit,and MLS and MLT have significant changes.(2)The continuation task increases the amount of coordination,and the CP/C changed significantly.(3)The continuation task positively affects the amount of subordination,and DC/C and DC/T have changed significantly.(4)The continuation task improves the particular structure,and the significant change can be seen in CN/C.In addition,second language learning needs a long-term process.The relatively short period of the experiment and the limited number of subjects may lead to the insufficiency of the data,which needs to be further improved.However,this study is an active exploration of the continuation task in English writing teaching.This study can provide a reference for the teaching and research in English writing,especially in the method to improve the syntactic complexity of English writing.