| English writing is an essential aspect that reflects students' English proficiency and practical application ability,but Chinese students' English proficiency is relatively low.What's worse,writing has become a relatively weak link in the process of teaching college English.The combination of learner autonomy and writing is becoming a new trend in writing research.However,the research of writing autonomy has not received much attention in the entire writing teaching reform.“Continuation Task”(shortened as CT)is a foreign language teaching approach that encourages students to write more and promote learning by writing.It aims at enhancing students' writing autonomy,shifting teachers' focus to task design,allowing students to have the content to write,thus enhancing their foreign language ability.In addition,in the field of researches concerning CT,few researches have focused on the writing subject,more specifically,learners.Therefore,this paper attempts to explore the positive effects of CT on learners' writing proficiency and English writing autonomy with the following methods: experimental study,questionnaire,and interview.To be more specific,the research adopts experimental study method to explore whether CT can improve students' writing autonomy,if yes,in what aspects.In addition,the research adopts survey method(including questionnaires and interview)to explore students' attitudes towards CT.This research lasts sixteen weeks,carried out in two sophomore academic English writing classes at a university in the northwestern region of China.One class is randomly chosen as Control Group(shortened as CG)and another class is chosen as Experimental Group(shortened as EG).The research procedures are divided into five phases: firstly,students' English proficiency was t-tested based on their pre-test of the English writing.The five-point Likert questionnaire of writing autonomy was also conducted in these two groups;Then,the writing teacher teaches the same content with the same teaching approach for the two groups.As for the students in EG,the teacher assigns them four continuation tasks every two weeks,and they are required to independently finish these tasks after class;Next,the two groups of students took a post-test of English writing to test their writing achievement,and the same questionnaire was conducted again in these two groups;Next,the data collected in this experiment was analyzed by the tool Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS)25.0 version to testify the relevance between students' writing proficiency and writing autonomy;Finally,face-to-face interviews were conducted in EG at the end of the experiment,which aimed to explore students' attitudes toward CT and the implications of the above findings for English writing instruction.The results are presented as follows: 1)CT can improve student's writing proficiency and writing autonomy;there is a positive relationship between CT and students' English writing autonomy.Furthermore,CT highly promotes students' self-esteem and self-confidence in writing and their writing motivation;2)most of students hold positive attitudes towards CT.In conclusion,CT can improve student's writing autonomy through the improvement of their self-esteem and self-confidence in writing and their writing motivation.The research has the following pedagogical implications for English writing teaching.First,CT can help students overcome their emotional barriers in the process of foreign language learning and enhance their sense of achievement and self-confidence in foreign language learning;Secondly,the major task of a writing teacher is to design appropriate writing tasks that can provide a context for practicing a foreign language,which pushes students to have the content to write and want to write more;Thirdly,teachers' positive feedback,a relaxed writing atmosphere and writing length accounting for the highest percentage of the total writing score have greatly inspired students to output what they have acquired during their own writing processes. |
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