An Experimental Study Of The Comparative Continuation In College English Writing

“The reading-writing integrated continuation task”(“reading continuation”)by Professor Wang Chuming(2012)organically combines language input and output,language imitation and creation,language learning and application.However,compared with interpersonal interactions,reading continuation is weaker in alignment and interaction(Wang,2018).“Comparative continuation” has been proposed in response to these problems.In addition to the advantages of reading continuation,another feature of comparative continuation is that a complete passage can be used as a reading material so as to increase the interaction between the source passage and the continuation,and between the reader and the text.In order to justify the effectiveness and applicability of comparative continuation,this study selected two parallel classes among freshmen of non-English major in an independent college as the research subjects,and conducted a teaching experiment for13 weeks.For the control class,we adopted the conventional writing method,whereas for the experimental class we used comparative continuation.Specifically,this study explored the following questions:(1)How does the comparative continuation affect the overall quality of English writing?(2)How does the comparative continuation affect the syntactic complexity of students' written products?(3)How does the comparative continuation affect the text coherence of continuation writings?In this study,the scores of pretest and post-test were evaluated with reference to rating criteria of CET-4 and CET-6,and the significant differences in pretest and post-test were analyzed with SPSS21.0.The L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)was utilized to analyze the syntax complexity indices to detect the syntactic complexity of composition;Coh-metrix3.0 was adopted to analyze the text coherence indices to check the text coherence.Findings were as follows:(1)Compared with conventional writing teaching,comparative continuation could significantly improve students' overall writing quality.In the post-test,the mean score of the experimental class was significantly higher than that in the control class(p=0.000 <0.05).The scores of the post-test in the three levels of experimental class were all improved,and the scores of low-score and intermediate groups were significantly higher than those in the pretest.(2)The experimental class was higher than the control class in multiple indicators of syntactic complexity measurement.Among them,the numbers of C/S in sentence complexity,C/T,CT/T,DC/C and DC/T in subordination,and VP/T in particular structure were significantly improved.The numbers of MLC in length of production,C/T,CT/T,DC/C and DC/T in subordination,CP/C and CP/T in coordination in the three groups of the experimental class were all promoted.But three groups had almost no improvement of T/S in coordination,and the low-score group decreased significantly.(3)In terms of text coherence,the number of overlaps between adjacent sentences and all sentences in the experimental class was basically higher than that in the control class,and the mean of the adjacent sentence overlap was significantly improved.Multiple latent semantic analysis indicators on the experimental class were improved.With regard to the use of conjunctions,the experimental class was greater than the control class in all indicators,but there was no significant improvement.Finally,based on the research results,some suggestions were provided for teachers and students,and in terms of teaching materials respectively.