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

Continuation task is a new type of writing method put forward by Wang Chuming in2012.In the process of continuation task,students are supposed to read a passage without the end firstly,then they need to accomplish the passage by creatively imitating and using the language and content of the original passage on the basis of their full understanding of the passage.Continuation task has been proved to have positive effects on language learning,so most researchers mainly explore its impacts on students' English writing performance,while ignoring its influence on students' emotional factors.Emotional factors play an important role in the learning process of students.The American linguist Krashen put forward “Affective Filter Hypothesis” in 1982.He believes that emotional factors play an important role in the process of learners' language acquisition.As an important part of emotional factors,anxiety has great influence on language learning.This paper will expand the research field of continuation task,and explore the effects of continuation task on senior high school students' English writing anxiety.On the theoretical foundation of “Input Hypothesis”,“Output Hypothesis”,Interactive Alignment Theory and “Affective Filter Hypothesis”,this research attempts to find out whether continuation task can effectively reduce high school students' English writing anxiety.In order to achieve this research goal,this study sets the following three research questions:(1)What is the current situation of senior high school students' English writing anxiety?(2)What effects does continuation task have on reducing senior high school students' English writing anxiety?(3)How is the delayed effects of continuation task on reducing senior high school students' English writing anxiety? In order to address the research questions,the author conducted a 19-week experiment in a second high school in Gaizhou,choosing 90 students from two parallel classes of grade 2 as the experimental participants.One class was randomly selected as the controlled class and the other class was the experimental class.In the controlled class,the traditional English writing teaching method was adopted,and in the experimental class,continuation task teaching method was adopted.The experimental instrument used in this research was the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory compiled by Cheng in 2004,and SPSS 24.0 was used to sort out and analyze the experimental data.After the experiment was finished,6 students from the experimental class were randomly selected for interview.The results of this research show that English writing anxiety is common among senior high school students,and the whole writing anxiety level is relatively high,and avoidance behavior reaches the highest level,followed by cognitive anxiety and somatic anxiety.In addition,the research results indicate that continuation task has striking promotion effects on reducing senior high school students' English writing anxiety,and its effects on reducing students' cognitive anxiety is most prominent.In the process of continuation task,students' reading and writing are combined with each other,which strengthens the interaction between the students and the passage,and reduces students' writing anxiety.Finally,the delayed test of this experiment show that continuation task has the delayed effects on relieving senior high school students' English writing anxiety,and it can be adopted as a writing method to effectively relieve students' English writing anxiety.This research suggests that we should pay attention to students' writing emotional factors in the future teaching,enrich the writing evaluation form,and design a variety of writing teaching activities.Due to the limitations of some subjective and objective factors,this research will inevitably have shortcomings,which requires further researches and reflections by researchers.