A Study On The Effects Of Backward Design Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Competence

Writing plays an important role in English learning and college entrance examination.Continuation task is a foreign language learning method proposed by Professor Wang that combines reading and writing: after reading the material,students are required to write the sequel of the text.It is also one kind of testing item in New Scheme of College Entrance Examination.Enlightened by previous research accomplishments in continuation task,based on the Input Hypothesis,the Output Hypothesis and Interactive Alignment Model,this study combines continuation task with backward design to investigate the effect of backward design continuation task on students’ writing competence.More specifically,the effect of backward design continuation task on students’ writing competence in holistic aspect and content,structure,language aspects and on different levels of students are investigated in this study.The research shall address two questions:(1)What are the effects of backward design continuation task on senior high school students’ writing competence?(2)What are the effects of backward design continuation task on different levels of senior high school students’ writing competence?To answer the above research questions,this study implements an experimental teaching project,which compares between an experimental class(EC)and a control class(CC),where the quantitative and qualitative research methods are applied.The research subjects are 100 students in senior one from a senior high school in Zibo City of Shandong Province.The experiment lasts for 7 weeks.The students in EC take the backward design continuation task,while the CC take the traditional continuation task teaching.The whole experiment consists of six rounds of backward design continuation task exercise,two writing tests,two questionnaires and two semi-structured interviews for several students.Writing tests,questionnaires and semi-structured interviews are given respectively before and after the experiment.Through comparing the data between the EC and the CC in Statistic Package for Social Science 26.0(SPSS 26.0),the effects of backward design continuation task on students’ writing competence are analyzed.The findings are as follows.(1)In the end of the experiment,the writing scores of the students in EC is significantly better than those in CC especially in content and structure.This finding proves the benefit of backward design continuation task compared with the traditional method to teach continuation task.The merits of backward design lie in its purposefulness,various assessment devices for checking,focusing on students’ needs,a great many opportunities to generate output and high alignment effect so on and so forth.In terms of the significant effect on students’ content and language competence,it may result from the well-rounded design of content and structure part and students’ limited level of content and structure competence to have the large room to improve.The reasons why the effect on language aspect is inconspicuous may lie in three aspects.First and foremost,students have formed their language stock based on years of language learning.Such language ability can’t be significantly promoted in a short time.Meanwhile,the teacher’s teaching focus is not entirely on students’ language development.The teacher only provides students with common and useful expressions.While the checking for the mastery of the students is ignored.The memorization and mastery checking of common and useful expressions are ignored.Furthermore,students’ learning motivation to memorize common expressions is not stimulated.No enough practice to apply memorized expressions is supplied by the teacher.(2)The effect of backward design continuation task is conspicuous on intermediateand low-level students,but there is no significant difference in high-level students’ writing competence in EC and CC.The reasons why high-level students can’t have great progress are as follows.For one thing,high-level students have relatively higher writing competence than intermediate-and low-level students.Hence,they have less room to improve especially in a short time.For another,the teaching focus is more on low-and intermediate-level students,the needs of high-level students are neglected to some extent.The teaching implications of the study are:(1)Backward design continuation task exerts positive effect on students’ writing competence.Hence,it’s of vital importance for teachers to explore the ways of applying it in class.(2)Students always have difficulty in guessing the plot.Teachers need to help and guide them.After certain structure training,students can have great progress in structure and boost their confidence.Structure training is indispensable in the class.Language is the foundation of writing.Common and useful expressions,opportunities to use the expressions in practice for students should be offered by the teacher.The memorization and application of the students and mastery checking of the teacher of these expressions should never be underestimated.Only in this way,can students’ motivation to learn be stimulated and students’ sense of achievement can be facilitated especially for low-level students.(3)Different students have different pursuits and attitudes,stratified teaching should be taken into consideration.As a result of diversified subjective and objective reasons,this study still has limitations.Later comers need to prolong the duration of teaching experiment and increase the sample size.Besides,teachers need to concentrate more on the checking of the consolidation of students and increase the opportunities of personal learning for students.