Effects Of The Continuation Task On The Development Of Writing Fluency,Accuracy And Complexity

The continuation task is a recently-developed writing task,basically combining writing with reading in order to facilitate English learners’ reading and writing abilities.This task is on the basis of the extension hypothesis put forward by Professor Wang Chuming as well as other studies on the integration of reading and writing both at home and abroad.In the continuation task,learners are provided with an incomplete reading passage and are required to complete it with imagination and creativity.The extension hypothesis and the continuation task have aroused great attention recently.Previous studies have exemplified that the continuation task and thereby the extension hypothesis can raise learners’ awareness of their deficiencies and thus provide an appropriate learning model which at least contributes to learners’ writing accuracy.However,in discussing writing proficiency,the previous studies usually use narration as reading materials and participants only receive no more than four times of training.The present study,therefore,tries to address the lack by conducting long-term training with two genres of reading materials involved,namely narration and argumentation.This thesis is a case study designed longitudinally,lasting for over five months.Six participants,divided into two groups,have been invited to develop their writing ability by doing argumentative and narrative continuation tasks once a week.The group of participants who wrote narrative continuation tasks first was named as the narrative continuation task group and the other group,writing argumentative continuation tasks first,was named the argumentative continuation task group.The developmental patterns of writing proficiency,problems of selecting materials,methods of improving the utility of materials,participants’ attitudes towards each training,and possible factors influencing improvement were explored through an in-depth analysis of each practice and interview.Except for the training phase,the participants were also given a pretest,mid-test and post-test,respectively to examine their development in writing fluency,accuracy and complexity.Results showed that the participants did improve their writing accuracy while their writing fluency and complexity showed a different tendency in terms of different measures and genres of practice tasks.Additionally,the participants in the narrative continuation task group had similar patterns of improvement in all three proficiency measures while the participants in the argumentative continuation task group had quite a few differences.It was also found that factors like English proficiency,learning habits and time allocation were non-negligible factors influencing the participants’ performance.The above findings suggested that when designing continuation tasks,it is recommendable to opt out unqualified materials.Besides,it would be advisable if teachers revise the reading materials,elaborate writing directions and adjust their assignment design according to students’ performance and purposes of training.