An Action Research On Continuation Task Training Junior School Students' English Writing Competence

The Compulsory Curriculum Standards(2011)suggested teachers should pay more attention on developing students' integrated language abilities and the language skill is the most important part of it which contains listening,speaking,reading and writing.However,the current situation of junior middle school writing teaching is far from being satisfactory,and also separates the training of reading and writing.It's not very helpful for the improvement of students' writing proficiency.The writing method combines reading and writing which proposed by Wang Chuming(2012)to promote writing skill by reading.And this writing method from input to output can effectively improve students' writing proficiency.The Continuation Task is a new type of writing teaching method that combine the reading and writing.Based on the situation of junior middle school English writing teaching,the researcher is adopted the Continuation Task aims to explore whether this method can improve eighth graders' writing ability.The research discussed the following research questions:(1)Can the Continuation Task help students improve their writing interests?(2)Can the Continuation Task enhance students'confidence and sense of achievement in writing?(3)Can the Continuation Task develop eighth graders in English writing ability?This three months action research was conducted among 35 students from a class of grade two students in junior middle school.The data in this study are mainly collected from two questionnaires,several times of semi-structured interview,two writing tests,teaching diary and seven times of continuation tasks.The action research contains two rounds and each round lasts four weeks.And the writing data will be analyzed by iWrite 2.0 through language,content,structure and punctuation.The other data will be computer-analyzed by SPSS.Through the comparative analysis of the data,this study draws the following conclusions:Firstly,the training method of reading and writing gives students a sense of mission,which often greatly improves students' interests in writing.Secondly,The Continuation Task can enhance students' confidence in English writing and improve their attitudes towards English writing.At last,The Continuation Task can effectively improve students' English writing ability,which has a significant impact on writing language,content,text and norms,and enhance students' comprehensive language use ability.