Production-Oriented Approach Or Continuation Task:A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of The Two Approaches On Students' Writing Competence

The production-oriented approach and the continuation task,two kinds of foreign language writing teaching approaches,have great positive influence on students' writing competence in China.Relevant studies in recent years have shown that both production-oriented approach and continuation task have significantly positive effects on improving students' foreign language writing competence.However,most studies have been explored the two approaches as independent teaching methods but few researchers have made a comparison between their effects on promoting learning.To explore whether there are differences in their promotion effects of the two approaches and the students' attitudes towards them,this thesis puts forward the following two research questions:1.On the premise that both the production-oriented approach and the continuation task can effectively promote students' foreign language writing competence,which one is more effective ?2.For students,which one is more acceptable,the production-oriented approach or the continuation task?To address the above two questions,this thesis adopts both quantitative research methods to conduct a comparative study on the production-oriented approach and the continuation task.This study took 110 students from two natural classes in the second year of primary education major in Chongqing University of Education as the research objects and divided them into experimental group 1 and experimental group 2,who were taught by the production-oriented approach and the continuation task respectively.The number of students in the two classes was the same and their English writing competence was comparable.The whole experiment lasted for 5 weeks,including a pre-test,two interventions,a post-test and two questionnaires,and the results were mainly obtained by pre-test and post-test.In the course of the experiment,the researchers conducted three writing tests in experimental group 1 and experimental group 2 respectively.Adopting the scoring criteria of CET-4 and CET-6,the test papers were scored by three English teachers with TEM-8 proficiency and the average score given by the three teachers was regarded as the final score of the students' writing test.Before the start of the first week of the experiment,the pre-test was conducted and the final writing scores of the students in the two experimental groups were analyzed with independent sample T-test.According to the data,there was no significant difference in the writing proficiency of the two classes.The results of the pre-test also further confirmed the feasibility of this study.In the last week of the experiment,the post-test was conducted.The independent sample T-test was used to analyze the students' scores in the post-test.Results showed that there was no significant difference in the writing scores of the two experimental groups in the post-test.To sum up,the two teaching approaches have a positive impact on the improvement of students' writing competence during the experimental period,but there is no significant difference in the intensity of the promotion effect.The final questionnaire data analysis shows that students hold more positive attitudes towards the production-oriented approach.However,when comparing the number of students from 8 points to 11 points and ?11 points in the two groups,the author found that the number of students in the experimental group 1 increased significantly in the stage of 8 points to 11 points,but the number of students in the experimental group 2 decreased in the stage of 8 points to 11 points.And there is no significant difference between the experimental group 1 and experimental group 2 at the score of ? 11 points.That is to say,the number of the experimental group 1 increased more significantly in the intermediate segment,while there is no significant difference on the number of students in the high segment between experimental group 1 and experimental group 2.To sum up,in view of the two questions raised in this study,the conclusions are as follows:First,in terms of improving students' writing competence,there is no significant difference between the production-oriented approach and the continuation task during the experimental period.However,the production-oriented approach has a more significant effect on the writing competence of intermediate segment students,while there is no significant difference between the POA and the CT in promoting the writing competence of students in the high-segment.Second,students are more inclined to the production-oriented approach than the continuation task.Finally,this thesis draws some inspirations for the teaching of foreign language writing in colleges: In the teaching of writing,the dynamic and abundant teaching process is more in line with the needs of students than the static teaching process,which can better mobilize the enthusiasm of students.