An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of The Intensified Continuation Task On Chinese Learners’ Article Use Based The Xu-argument

The difference in the use of article between Chinese and English and the complexity of article make it difficult for Chinese EFL(English as Foreign Language)learners to acquire article.Therefore,some beneficial explorations about article acquisition are needed.The continuation task is one of the effective methods to promote second language acquisition.A great deal of studies on the continuation task have emerged in the field of second language acquisition,and many variations have also been proposed.Intensified continuation task combines notice with it and provides a new research direction for promoting the acquisition of English grammar.However,there are few studies on the effect of intensified continuation task on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English article.Based on Xu-argument,which proposed by Wang Chuming,the current study aims to answer three questions:1.Can the intensified continuation task more effectively promote the acquisition of English article of Chinese senior high school student than the ordinary continuation task?2.How do the errors of English article change after the intensified continuation task?3.What is the difference between errors of English article use in corpora and errors of English article use after intensified continuation task?In order to answer these questions,an experimental study was conducted by the researcher.Seventy subjects in Grade 1 of senior high school,divided into two classes,participated in this study.Class 1 was assigned ordinary continuation task,the other for intensified continuation task.The whole study lasted for 12 weeks.In the first week,pre-test was conducted,and in the second week,two classes were respectively explained to ordinary continuation task and intensified continuation task.From 3 to 10 weeks,each group completed their own tasks,and in the 10 th week,immediate post-test was conducted,and in the 12 th week,delayed post-test and interview were conducted.The data in corpus,which is retrieved by Antconc3.4.4 and researcher,were compared with those of the intensified continuation class.The data obtained from the experiment and corpus were analyzed by SPSS,and the interview data were used for qualitative analysis.The results show that: 1)compared with ordinary continuation task,intensified continuation task can effectively promote article acquisition;2)after intensified continuation task,learners can significantly reduce the rate of omission and confusion of articles,and the effect is significant in indefinite article;3)compared with the errors in corpus,the proportion of confusion is the highest in articles acquired after intensified continuation task,while the proportion of omission is the highest in corpus;In addition,the proportion of indefinite article in the article redundancy after the intensified continuation task is higher,while the proportion of definite article in the corpus is higher.The teaching enlightenment of this study includes: 1)different teaching can be used according to different article errors and different article types 2)the intensified continuation task can be used in students’ article learning;3)Under the background that the continuation task has been involved in College Entrance Examination,the intensified continuation task can improve the alignment between input and output,and provide some enlightenment for grammar teaching.