An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Continuation Task On Linguistic Complexity In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is undoubtedly important for English learners.For many senior high school students,writing is one of the four basic skills they must master.However,for many years,writing teaching in senior high schools has been neglected.Due to the heavy task of English teaching and the limited English classes,writing is more or less neglected,which to some extent leads to students‘ poor performance in English writing.Furthermore,for a long time,English reading and writing have been separated.People fail to realize the close relationship between reading and writing,and tend to separate input from output in writing teaching.These are the important factors that lead to the dissatisfactory situation of writing teaching in China.Many empirical studies have shown that reading can promote writing in many ways.Therefore,many researchers advocate the combination of reading and writing in English teaching.Among them,Wang Chuming formally put forward the method of continuation task in 2012 and applied it in the practice of learning and teaching to verify its effect of promoting learning.Since then,many experts and scholars at home and abroad have conducted a series of studies on the role of this teaching approach in various aspects of English teaching,such as writing,grammar and so on.On the basis of previous studies,this thesis applied this teaching method to senior high school English writing teaching.Based on the guidance of the Production-oriented Approach and Interaction and Alignment Theory,the author took an empirical research to verify the effectiveness of the teaching method in the development of linguistic complexity in senior high school students‘ writing.The study chose two parallel classes.The empirical class(EC)adopted the teaching method – continuation task,and control class(CC)adopted the teaching method of topic-writing task.Through teaching experiments and writing tests,the following questions are discussed: 1)How does continuation task influence the lexical complexity of senior high school students‘ writing? 2)How does continuation task influence the syntactic complexity of senior high school students‘ writing?After the experiment,an analysis was made of the linguistic complexity of the participants‘ writings through the L2 syntactic complexity analyzer and the L2 lexical complexity analyzer.Finally,the author made a statistical analysis of the changes of the linguistic complexity in the two writing tests by the means of SPSS21.0.The main findings of this study are as follows.First and foremost,continuation task could effectively promote the development of lexical complexity in students‘ writing,especially in Lexical Density(LD),Type Token Ratio(TTR),Verb Variation II(VV2)and Adjective Variation(Adj.V).Secondly,continuation task could effectively accelerate the development of syntactic complexity in students‘ writing,especially in Mean Length of Sentence(MLS),Mean Length of T-unit(MLT),Dependent Clause per T-unit(DC/T)and Dependent Clause per Clause(DC/C).Besides,as for English teachers,in the teaching of continuation task in senior high schools,they are advised to make students be aware of the main idea,language style and the logic of the essay so as to take full advantage of continuation task in accelerating learner‘ foreign language acquisition.Continuation task tests students‘ comprehensive ability of language use and it requires teachers to attach great importance to the cultivation of students‘ analytical ability,reading ability and thinking ability in English writing teaching.It can be summarized that the continuation task has strong influence on linguistic complexity,and teachers are also encouraged to do something to help students perform well in this writing class.