Effects Of Continuation Tasks On Senior High School Students’ English Relative Clauses Acquisition

The differences in the use of relative clauses in Chinese and English as well as the complexity of its structure make it difficult for Chinese English learners to acquire relative clauses.Hence,it is worth exploring how to effectively promote the acquisition of relative clauses on Chinese English learners.On the basis of Xu-argument theory,Wang Chuming’s continuation task is closely combined with input reading and output writing,which has been effectively promoting foreign language acquisition.From the perspective of learning promotion,many studies have confirmed that the continuation task plays an effective role in promoting language acquisition including L2 vocabulary acquisition,discourse collaboration,and writing performance etc.On this basis,a great deal of studies on the variation of the continuation task have emerged in the field of second language acquisition,among which the enhanced continuation task binds notice to it and supplies a new study direction for promoting the acquisition of English grammar.In order to further optimize the English grammar teaching in senior high school,based on the experiments of Wang Qi and Wang Chuming(2019),taking the juniors of one senior high school in Gansu province as the participants,this study aimed to explore the acquisition effects of relative clauses by second language learners under two different conditions of continuation task.Then,from the perspective of learners’ English proficiency,this paper further analyzed the influence of the enhanced continuation task and the ordinary continuation task on senior high school students’ acquisition of relative clauses,and tried to analyze the reasons,so as to provide new suggestions and measures for English grammar teaching in senior high school.Specifically,the following two issues are discussed:1)What are the immediate posttest and delayed posttest effects of the enhanced continuation task and the ordinary continuation task on participants’ acquisition of relative clauses?2)What are the effects of the enhanced continuation task and the ordinary continuation task on the acquisition of the relative clauses among participants with different English proficiencies?In this study,168 students from three classes in the second grade of a senior high school in Gansu Province were enrolled in this experiment,which adopted the model of“pretest—experimental intervention—posttest—delayed posttest”.In the three classes,one was the control class,and the other two were the experimental classes,including the ordinary continuation task class and the enhanced continuation class.During the process of teaching experiment,both the two experimental classes carried out the continuation task,but the preceding reading material was a little bit different.The text materials of the ordinary continuation task class did not have any other processing except necessary annotation for the unfamiliar words in the texts,while the sentences related to relative clauses in the enhanced continuation class were clearly underlined,made bold and given clear instructions in the preceding reading materials.The whole experiment lasted for eight weeks.In the teaching intervention process,five rounds of continuation tasks were carried out.After the experiment,all the test data were collected and typed into SPSS Statistics 21 to detect whether the correctness of the relative clause in the enhanced continuation class and the ordinary continuation task class increased significantly with the teaching intervention and the passage of time by the single ANOVA measurement.And LSD post-hoc test was used to determine whether there was a significant difference between the correct rates of the enhanced continuation class and the ordinary continuation task class.The results showed that,1)both of the two continuation tasks could effectively promote the acquisition of relative clauses in senior high school students,but the promotion effect of enhanced continuation task was more significant.2)For learners with different English proficiencies,the acquisition effect of relative clauses of the enhanced continuation task class was better than that of the ordinary continuation task class.In particular,learners with high and low levels had the most significant acquisition effects,while learners with intermediate level had no significant effects.This study explores the effects of the enhanced continuation task and the ordinary continuation task on senior high school students’ acquisition of relative clauses,which provides feasible new ideas for senior high school students’ acquisition of relative clauses.At the same time,it offers a new way for English grammar teaching in senior high school.In English grammar teaching,students can be provided the continuation task to promote the acquisition of complex English structures.