Effects Of The Iterative Continuation On Senior High School Students' English Writing

The reading-writing integrated continuation task is a foreign language learning method that combines language input and output closely.It aims to improve students' writing ability by continuing a story with its ending erased,and its facilitative effect depends on the intensity of interaction between the learner and the reading material.Illuminated by previous research achievements in the continuation task,and in order to improve the intensity of interaction so as to maximize the task efficacy,based on the theories of input hypothesis,output hypothesis and alignment,this study attempts to apply iterative continuation to English teaching and verify its effectiveness on students' writing ability and motivation,as well as to investigate senior students' opinions on iterative continuation.What are the effects of the iterative continuation on senior high school students' English writing ability? What are the effects of the iterative continuation on senior high school students' English writing motivation? What are the students' attitudes toward the iterative continuation? All these are worthy of discussion.To answer the research question above,this study adopts an experimental teaching project including comparing between an experimental class(EC)and a control class(CC),in which the quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted.The research subjects are 101 students in grade two from a senior high school in Chongqing city.The experiment lasts for 12 weeks,the students in the EC take the iterative continuation for writing training,while the CC take the traditional writing teaching method.The whole experiment consists of six rounds of continuation writing exercise,two writing tests,two questionnaires and one semi-structured interview.Writing tests and questionnaires are given respectively before and after the experiment.Besides,a semi-structured interview is conducted as a supplement at the end of the experiment.Through comparing the data between the EC and the CC in Statistic Package for Social Science 22.0(SPSS 22.0),the effects of iterative continuation on the senior students' English writing performance are analyzed.The findings are as follows.(1)Research result shows that while the writing performance of the students in the EC,upon the ending of the experiment,is significantly better than those in the CC,especially in the aspects of organization and content.(2)The iterative continuation is of positive effect on students' writing motivation in the dimensions of surface motivation,deep motivation and achieving motivation throughout the experiment,especially in deep motivation.(3)Most of the students in the experimental class affirm the positive effects of iterative continuation.In their opinion,they can benefit a lot from the continuation writing since the iterative continuation play an important role in cultivating their creativity and logical thinking.And they feel more confident in their own writing ability.Due to various subjective and objective reasons,this study still has some limitations.Later comers need to extend the duration of teaching experiment and increase the sample size.Besides,in terms of the source text,both content and length need to be selected and modified more seriously based on students' actual English proficiency.