An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of The Continuation Task On Senior School Students' English Writing

English writing is the written expression of the English learners' thoughts.In the English test for college entrance examination,English writing is an important part.In the past few years,it has been a difficult point both in English teaching and learning.Considering this situation,the continuation task is adopted as a new attempt of the second language teaching.At present,although some research has been done mainly for students who are majoring in English at universities and colleges,there is little research on the continuation task applied in basic education.Besides,the research at home and abroad is still in the initial stage.Therefore,this study tries to explore the improvement of this new task of English writing for the students in L High School.The study attempts to probe into two research questions:(1)What effects does the continuation task have on the students' attitudes to writing in L High School?(2)What effects does the continuation task have on students' writing performance in L High School?Based on the theories of the interactive alignment model,learning by using principle,the output hypothesis and the input hypothesis,the author conducted a 16 weeks' experimental study.80 students(CC=40,EC=40)of senior 2 were randomly selected from L High School where the researcher was working.Regarding the research question of what effects the continuation task has on the students' attitudes to writing,the researcher mainly used the questionnaires and interview to obtain relevant data.In order to know what effects the continuation task has on students' writing performance,the author took pretest and post-test in the two classes,used SPSS 22.0 to make statistical analysis on the experimental results and discussed the second research question in terms of content,organization and language.The study finds that the continuation task has great effects on the students' attitudes to writing,because the students have become more active in the cognition,the emotion and the behavioral tendency.The paired-sample test indicates that there is no significant difference in the control class(P= 0.248 > 0.05)after the experiment,but there is significant difference in the experimental class(P= 0.000 < 0.05)after the experiment.As for the content,the total mean scores of the CC and EC in the pretest and post-test are 4.500 and 4.635,4.538 and 5.138 respectively.As for the organization,the mean scores of CC and EC in pretest are 4.500 and 4.635,but in post-test the mean scores are 4.538 and 5.138 respectively.As for the language,the mean scores of the CC and EC in the pretest and post-test are 6.000 and 6.180,6.050 and 6.850 respectively.The results of the study demonstrate that the continuation task is more conducive to enhancing students' attitudes to writing and writing performance in L High School.It can enhance the writing performance,and its impacts are better.Practical research of the continuation task is enriched in this experiment,and it has significant practical meaning.During the experiment,reading and writing are combined closely,which enables students to have the chance to use what they have read and have the chance to command more new knowledge.