A Study On The Application Of The Continuation Task To English Writing In Senior High School

Writing is one of the basic language skills.It serves as a significant symbol to measure learners' comprehensive language ability.Unfortunately,writing still remains a weak part in English teaching in senior high school.How to help students improve their writing effectively has become an important issue that lots of English teachers devote themselves to exploring.In classroom teaching,many teachers have been trying to explore available methods of improving students' writing,yet the present situation is not as ideal as anticipated.Faced with such kind of reality,Professor Wang Chuming puts forward a method called the continuation task,which is aimed at improving students' writing ability by the way of continuing the ending after reading the text.Following his theoretical and practical guidance,this paper is intended to apply the continuation task to senior high school English writing classroom to improve students' writing ability.This research is based on Krashen's input hypothesis,Swain's output hypothesis and the scaffolding theory.The subjects of this research are 116 students who come from two parallel classes of Senior 2 in Tianshui No.1 Middle School.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in the research,including questionnaires,writing tests and an interview.Based on the current situation of students' English writing in senior high school,the continuation task is applied to English writing classroom in the experimental class.Reading texts that are appropriate for the continuation task are selected from the textbooks or other reading materials.The study lasts for 18 weeks.It is mainly around such two questions as follows: Firstly,in what aspects might the continuation task benefit senior high school students to improve English writing? Secondly,what writing strategies might the teacher offer to students through the continuation task? In order to show the specific procedures,the paper has demonstrated some practical classroom teaching cases.This research has found that the application of the continuation task to senior English writing instruction has positive effects on students' English writing ability on the whole.Firstly,appropriate reading materials are selected for the continuation task,providing students with quantity of comprehensible language input.Secondly,the teacher can have a purposeful guide to scaffold students in writing.Thirdly,continuing the ending after reading the text can offer the opportunity to students in training their thinking ability to continue writing and exercising their imagination as well as creativity.All these can be clearly seen from the cases of students' writing demonstrated in the paper.Therefore,the continuation task proves to have active effects on the content,language and organization of students' compositions to a large extent.In the process of writing,students imitate the language and organization of the source texts,and conceive the content with creativity and imagination.Besides,they pay attention to linguistic richness and accuracy as well as contextual coherence,cohesion and logicality.