An Action Research On Application Of Continuation To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

With the development of society and the reform of education,the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools put forward clear requirements for students’ comprehension skills and expressive skills.In senior high school,as an expressive skill,English writing plays a very important role in English learning.However,in English writing,senior high school students still face problems such as lack of writing drive and interest,single and boring writing language,and insufficient language ability.At the same time,senior high school English writing teaching also has problems such as the phenomenon of English writing out of context and separation of reading and writing.The traditional English writing teaching method has been unable to solve the above problems.Continuation task which was proposed by Professor Wang(2012)provides a new idea for English writing teaching.Continuation task closely combines language understanding with output.Students finish continuation task through understanding the reading text.It always provides context and language support for students’ writing.With the advance of the college entrance examination reform,many provinces have taken the continuation task as one of the new English writing types in the college entrance examination,which makes continuation task attracted the attention and began to apply the continuation task by many senior high school teachers in the teaching of senior high school English writing.In view of the above situation,the author conducts an action research on the teaching of English continuation task,based on the language input hypothesis,language output hypothesis and alignment and interaction theory.Taking the students of Class 1,Grade 2 of a senior high school in D City,J Province as the research object,the author adopted the continuation task in the English class,aiming to answer the following three questions through two rounds of action research:(1)How can the continuation task in senior high school English writing teaching be implemented?(2)What impact will it have on students’ English writing qualities when the continuation task is applied to senior high school English writing teaching?(3)What are the changes in students’ motivation and attitude to English writing after continuation task teaching?The action research consisted of two rounds,which lasted for 4 months.The research tools included questionnaire,interview,test,data analysis tool SPSS21.0 and text analysis tool Coh-Metrix3.0.After the two rounds of action research,the author summarized the implementation steps of applying continuation task to senior high school English writing teaching,and used SPSS21.0 and Coh-Metrix3.0 to process and analyze the relevant data of students’ English writing scores and text tested before and after the action research.After making a comparative analysis of the two questionnaires and combining with the interview transcripts,the author draws the following conclusions:(1)The application of continuation task to senior high school English writing teaching can improve students’ English writing performance,and improve the quality of students’ English writing texts,including the word number of articles,easability,cohesion,lexical diversity and syntactical complexity.(2)After two rounds of action research,students’ motivation and attitude towards writing have been enhanced and improved.Based on the above research results,the author summarizes the enlightenment and limitations of this study,hoping to provide ideas and guidance for future English Continuation Teaching.