A Study On The Effect Of Continuation Task On English Writing Achievement And Writing Self-Efficacy Of Senior High School Students

As a productive skill,writing is one of the significant symbols of language learning ability.Researchers in psychology field actively explore psychological factors affecting students' writing ability,such as anxiety,writing attitudes,writing motivations and so on.Among these factors,self-efficacy,proposed by the famous psychologist Bandura(1986),attracts extensive attention.When encountering writing tasks,a wide range of students experience a low self-efficacy.Relevant studies declare that self-efficacy,to some extent,can affect students' achievement but there are few empirical studies related to how to effectively promote senior high school students' English writing self-efficacy through a specific writing method.Considering the very situation of domestic English education and Alignment Theory,Wang Churning put forward a new writing approach called Continuation Task in 2012.This method is easy to operate.Generally,a passage selected from foreign language books is adapted by removing the ending and then learners are asked to read and complete the passageEmpirical studies on Continuation Task mainly focus on students' writings and few of them are related to psychological factors influencing writings.Moreover,in previous studies,most of the subjects are undergraduates but not senior high school students.Given all that,the present study aims to explore the effects of Continuation Task on English writing achievement and writing self-efficacy of senior high school students and further explore its effect on students with different English proficiency levelsSubjects of the study were 96 students from two classes in Grade Two in Longcheng Senior High School,Shenzhen,Guangdong.Before the experiment,all students in two classes were asked to complete a writing test and a writing self-efficacy scale.The result of pre-test showed that there were no significant differences between these two classes both in writing self-efficacy and writing score.To this end,the author took these two classes as experimental class and control class,and divided students in the experimental class into high level,medium level and low level based on their scores in pre-test.During the experiment,students in experimental class practiced Continuation Task while students in control class practiced the topic writing task.After the experiment,two groups completed another writing test and writing self-efficacy scale.The whole research lasted for 14 weeks.All of the data from the experiment were analyzed by the social science statistical software SPSS 17.0.The results showed:(1)Continuation Task improved English writing achievement of senior high school students obviously;(2)Continuation Task made a significant difference in enhancing English writing self-efficacy of senior high school students;(3)Compared with high-level students,low-level students were affected significantly by Continuation Task in terms of both writing achievement improvement and writing self-efficacy enhancement.The present study is only an attempt of Continuation Task in English writing teaching in a senior high school.Research results initially prove that Continuation Task is operable in senior high schools and provide some enlightenment to English writing teaching.In English writing class of senior high school,teachers can combine reading and writing closely through Continuation Task to enhance students' English writing self-efficacy and further improve their writing achievements.