A Study On Peer Interaction In English Continuation Task Of Junior High School Students

Continuation task is an effective foreign language writing method,which combines reading and writing,was put forward by Chinese scholar Professor Wang Chuming(2012).This method combines the imitation of language with the innovation of content,and the learning and application of language.In recent years,continuation task has attracted the attention of the scholars in the field of foreign language teaching at home and abroad,but the discussion on the combination of continuation task and peer interaction is still concentrated at the theoretical level,and the empirical study on the effect of promoting English writing is still relatively scarce.Therefore,the writer tries to combine the peer interaction with the continuation task,and aims to apply the peer interaction in continuation task to the English writing class of junior middle school,and discuss the effects of the peer interaction in continuation task on the English writing of the junior middle school students.This study mainly focuses on the following three questions: ? What is the effect of peer interaction in continuation task on English writings' fluency of junior high students? ? What is the effect of peer interaction in continuation task on English writings' accuracy of junior high students? ? What is the effect of peer interaction in continuation task on English writings' complexity of junior high students?In this experiment,105 students in the ninth grade of a middle school in Chengguan District of Lanzhou were selected as the experimental participants.They were from two randomly selected parallel classes;54 students in class 14 being randomly chosen to be the experimental group,and 51 students in class 15 as control group.On the basis of literature research,combined with the characteristics of junior high school students,the author adopted the intervention research paradigm of “pretest,training and post-test”,and carried out the research for ten weeks.The experiment is divided into three stages.The first stage is the preparation stage,which two classes are pretested in order to know whether the English writing level of the two classes is the same.The second stage is the experimental stage,which lasts for eight weeks.In the experimental class peer interaction in continuation task is carriedout while continuation task without peer interaction is adopted in the control class.After the experiment,post-tests were carried out in two classes in order to compare the effects of the experiment.During the whole experiment,in order to estimated the participants' fluency,accuracy and complexity according to the measurement standards of Ellis and Yuan(2004),the writer collected all the writings of the participants in two classes,and all the data were analyzed by SPSS 21.0.Conclusions are as follows: both peer interaction in continuation task and continuation task can improve the fluency of junior high school students' English writing,but as to accuracy and complexity of students' writing,peer interaction in continuation task is more effective than the continuation task without peer interaction.