A Study On The Effects Of The Continuation Task On Senior High School Students' English Writing Anxiety

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of continuation task on senior high school students' English writing anxiety and their writing performance with different anxiety levels.Emotional factor is an important reason that hinders students' writing performance,and writing anxiety is one of the key emotional factors.Previous researches reveal that writing anxiety can affect students' writing performance,and there is a negative correlation between writing anxiety and writing performance.Continuation task proposed by Wang Chuming requires learners to write creatively after reading a moderately difficult and interesting material in foreign language.It combines reading comprehension with language output,which not only improves students' English writing level,but also enhances their English writing motivation and sense of autonomous learning.Students need to interact effectively with the reading material and the author.The content and language written by them should be consistent with the original text,so that students can improve their self-concept and reduce the writing anxiety in the process creative imitation.In recent years,most of the studies on continuation task have focused on the effect of promoting learning,while the researches on the impact of continuation task on students' writing anxiety are relatively insufficient.The purpose of this study is to explore whether continuation task can reduce senior high school students' English writing anxiety and improve their writing performance.The specific research questions are as follows:1.What is the effect of continuation task on senior high school students' English writing anxiety(cognitive anxiety,somatic anxiety and avoidance behavior)?2.What is the effect of continuation task on the English writing performance of senior high school students with different anxiety levels(content,organization,vocabulary and grammar)?Based on the input theory,output theory and interaction alignment theory,this study selects 168 students from two parallel classes in a senior high school in Hebei Province as the research subjects.The two classes were randomly divided into the experimental class and the control class.During the three-month experiment,continuation task was applied in the experimental class,while topic writing was adopted in the control class.The research instruments of this study include the pre-test and post-test papers,Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory and interview questions.The pre-test and post-test is used to examine the effect of continuation task on students' English writing performance,including the effect of continuation task on students' overall writing performance and on the writing performance of students with different anxiety levels.The questionnaire is used to investigate the effect of continuation task on students' writing anxiety.The interview can make up for the defect of the closed answers of the questionnaire and comprehensively reflect the influence of continuation task on students' writing anxiety.The data collected were analyzed by SPSS 23.0.The results are as follows:1.Compared with topic writing,continuation task can effectively reduce students' writing anxiety,especially in cognitive anxiety and somatic anxiety.2.Both topic writing and continuation task can improve students' writing performance to a certain extent,but the effect of continuation task is more significant.Continuation task can improve the writing level of high anxiety and low anxiety students,and the effect is obvious in content,vocabulary and grammar.However,the effect of continuation task is not obvious on improving the writing performance of middle anxiety students.To sum up,continuation task has a significant effect on reducing students' writing anxiety and improving their writing performance,and it also has a positive impact on English writing teaching in senior high schools.The conclusion of this study further confirms the learning effect of continuation task and its effect in reducing students' writing anxiety,which has theoretical and practical significance.It also shows the feasibility of implementing continuation task in high schools.