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

English writing is an important expression of output ability among the four basic language skills.Writing ability is very vital to learners' English study.Meanwhile,it is very difficult for learners to improve English writing rapidly.Writing part is also very difficult for senior high school students during the college entrance examination.Therefore,how to teach English writing deserves the exploration of English teachers and experts.Professor Wang Chuming in Guangdong Foreign Language University advocated “the continuation-task” method in writing with the goal of improving the effects of writing instruction and learners' writing ability.This writing method aims to improve students' writing proficiency by creatively developing a given passage without an ending.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted to figure out the effects of the writing method on improving students' writing proficiency and enhancing their writing motivation.There are totally three research questions in this study.First,what effects does the continuation task have on improving senior high school students' writing performance? Second,what effects does the continuation task have on enhancing senior high school students' writing motivation? Third,how does the continuation task influence the students with high-proficiency and low-proficiency of English? The whole study lasts for sixteen weeks.81 senior three students from two parallel classes in Mengyang Middle School are selected as research subjects in this study.The instruments include two writing tests,two questionnaires and one interview.The participants will receive writing tests and conduct questionnaires before and after the experiment.The researcher will select some participants from the EG(Experimental Group)that have received training to do an interview and make a record of it.All the data that is collected by the researcher will be analyzed by SPSS 20.0.The conclusions can be drawn as follows: First,the continuation task method can improve students' writing proficiency significantly in terms of the overall writing performance,content,structure,language and passage length.The EG(Experimental Group)has made bigger progress in writing performance than the CG(Control Group).Second,we can conclude that the continuation task also has significant effects on the improvement of students' writing motivation from the results of questionnaires and interview.Among the three aspects of writing motivation,the achieving motivation and deep motivation are significantly enhanced while there is a little change in surface motivation.Third,the continuation task has different effects on students with high-proficiency and low-proficiency of English.What's more,the high-proficiency students make bigger progress than the low-proficiency students.There are some valuable implications from the research.First,teachers should generate brainstorming.Second,teachers should attach importance to guiding students to make full understanding of the passage.Third,teachers should cultivate students' logic and creative thinking abilities.Fourth,teachers should cultivate students' ability of autonomous reading.Fifth,teachers should encourage students to ask questions initiatively and change their traditional roles in writing teaching.In the end,some constructive and available suggestions are put forward.At the same time,there are a lot of limitations,which should be paid further exploration in the future.