The Effects Of Reading-to-Write Tasks On Junior High School Students' Writing Proficiency

English writing proficiency is the ability that middle school students must possess,and how to improve writing proficiency of middle school students is an important as well as a difficult task in Chinese foreign language education.Previous studies indicate that reading-to-write tasks can effectively improve writing proficiency,and can promote the internalization of language knowledge.The continuation task and the summary writing are two typical writing tasks among reading-to-write tasks and have been proved to promote the improvement of writing proficiency.However,there are few empirical studies comparing the effects of the continuation task as well as the summary writing on junior high school students' writing proficiency,and exploring the reasons for the differences between them.Based on three theoretical frameworks,that is,the Input Hypothesis,the Output Hypothesis and the Interactive Alignment Model,this study attempts to verify the effects of the continuation task and those of the summary writing on writing proficiency.More importantly than all of that,this study struggles to compare the effects of the continuation task and those of the summary writing on writing proficiency.On the basis of the earlier research,a 12-week experiment is conducted to try to serve as two research questions:1)In terms of linguistic fluency,accuracy and grammatical complexity,what are the effects of different reading-to-write tasks(i.e.the continuation task and the summary writing)on junior high school students' writing proficiency?2)In terms of linguistic fluency,accuracy and grammatical complexity,what are the differences between the effects of the continuation task and those of the summary writing on junior high school students' writing proficiency?In order to answer the foregoing questions,this study took 76 Junior One students from two parallel classes in a middle school in Heyuan City as the research participants.The two classes were randomly divided into two groups: the summary writing group(Group 1)and the continuation task group(Group 2).Before the experiment,the two groups took part in a pre-test(a writing test),to ensure that therewas no significant difference between these two groups' writing proficiency.During the experiment,the two groups read the same narratives without endings.The continuation group was required to continue the end of the story after reading,while the summary group was supposed to summarize the content after reading.After the experiment,the two groups received a post-test(a writing test).When the writing test was finished,two students were randomly selected from each group for semi-structured interviews.The purpose is to dig deep into the students' processing methods and thinking in different writing tasks.All data collected from the experiment are analyzed through SPSS 18.0 from three dimensions,that is,linguistic fluency,accuracy and grammatical complexity.Independent-sample t test and paired-sample t test are conducted to analyze the data.Results from paired-sample t test unveil that the continuation task and the summary writing,two typical reading-to-write tasks,can improve junior high students' writing proficiency,especially on linguistic fluency and accuracy,but on complexity,both of them have a modest effect.This can be interpreted like that:improving grammatical complexity is a long-term work,therefore it is difficult to be improved in a short period of time.Results being shown from the independent-sample t test analysis,it is known that on linguistic fluency,the effect of the continuation task is much better than that of the summary writing.In terms of linguistic accuracy,superficially,there is no difference in the effects between both tasks.However,after students' compositions are carefully analyzed and four students are interviewed,it is shown that the students in the summary group often copy the reading materials to improve linguistic accuracy.As to grammatical complexity,there is neither significant difference between the two.This study confirms that reading-to-write tasks(the continuation task and the summary writing)have a positive effect on junior high students' writing proficiency.However,different reading-to-write tasks(the continuation task and the summary writing)have different effects on fluency,accuracy and complexity.Therefore,not only should the second language teachers be cognizant of the efficiency of thecontinuation task and the summary writing on writing proficiency,but also get different reading-to-write tasks in perspective.Concurrently,different reading-to-write tasks should be flexibly adopted in accordance with students' current competence.