Effects Of Task Repetition On English Letter Writing Competence Of Senior High School Students At Different Levels

As an important language skill,English writing plays an important role in high school English teaching and learning.Besides,the National English Curriculum Standards for General High School(2017)and China's Standards of English Language Ability(2018)call for the cultivation of students' cross-cultural communication consciousness and ability.Therefore,as one type of communication,more attention should be payed to English letter writing.However,at present,there are many problems existing in senior high school students' English letter writing,such as mistakes in letter format and errors in writing.This research tried to apply task repetition to the English letter writing teaching,exploring the effects of task repetition on letter format,writing fluency,writing accuracy and writing complexity of senior high school students at different levels.One hundred and ten senior high school students from two parallel classes in Bazhong Longquan Foreign Languages School took part in the selection and formed two groups(the High-level Group and the Low-level Group)of 15 students respectively.In the12-week comparative experiment,the subjects were asked to do the same English letter writing task for five times with an interval of two weeks.This research aims to answer following two questions: one is “Are there different effects of task repetition on English letter writing competence of senior high school students at different levels? If there are,what are they?”,and the other is “Are there optimal ‘repetition times' in the changing trends of senior high school students' English letter writing competence at different levels? If there are,when do the optimal “repetition times” appear respectively during task repetition?”.After the experiment,students' writing contents were analyzed and compared from letter format,writing fluency,writing accuracy and writing complexity respectively.Through the analysis of the experimental results,three major findings were obtained.Firstly,compared with the first writing,the English letter writing competence both of the High-level Group and the Low-level Group has been improved through task repetition.The High-level Group made progress with significance in the English letter format,writing fluency and writing grammatical complexity.And the improvement of the Low-level Group's English letter format and writing accuracy is more obvious.Secondly,through the comparison of the first and fifth writings,the degree of the improvement of English letter writing competence of the two groups is different.The rate of increase in the High-level Group is higher than that of the Low-level Group in terms of writing fluency,writing lexical and grammatical complexity.While the growth rate of the Low-level Group is higher than that of the High-level Group in the English letter format and writing accuracy.Thirdly,during the five-time task repetition in this research,the optimal “repetition time” for the High-level Group is three times.However,the optimal “repetition time”for the Low-level Group does not appear.It can be concluded that task repetition has a positive effect on English letter writing competence of senor high school students at different levels.Therefore,in the senior high school English letter writing teaching class,teachers can combine the task repetition with the letter writing effectively to improve students' English letter writing proficiency.