A Study On The Effect Of Integrated Writing Tasks On Complexity,Accuracy,Fluency In Senior High School Students’ English Writings

For a long time,though high school students have made a lot of efforts in English writing,English writing is still a challenge for them.Teachers pay more attention to teaching reading skills,explaining new words and grammar.In contrast,writing skills teaching has not attracted enough attention.Related research has shown that integrated writing tasks can promote learners’ writing ability.Therefore,this study will employ two integrated writing tasks: "reading-to-write task" and "video-assisted writing task",aiming to explore whether integrated writing tasks have an impact on complexity,accuracy,and fluency of high school students’ writings.This study proposed two research questions:(1)What are the effects of integrated writing tasks on complexity,accuracy,fluency in senior high school students’ English writings?(2)What are the changes of senior high school students’ attitudes towards writing after having been assigned integrated writing tasks?78 students in two classes from a senior high school in Hefei participated in this study.Each class contains 39 students.And they are in senior one.Class 1 is the experimental class(EC),in which students were required to finish two integrated writing tasks.Class 2 is the control class(CC),in which students were asked to finish two independent writing tasks.The duration of the experiment was two months.The two writing tasks were carried out at the end of each unit course.Students were asked to finish each writing within 30 minutes.The SPSS software was used to analyze the collected data.And the interview was used to investigate students’ attitudes towards writing after the experiment.The results show that integrated writing tasks can exert the following effects on students’ writing:(1)Reading-to-write task can help students make higher lexical density,video-assisted writing task can improve students’ writings in type/token ratio.At the same time,the syntactic complexity of two integrated writing tasks have significantly improved.(2)Integrated writing tasks do not affect the accuracy of the students’ compositions.(3)Integrated writing tasks are able to improve students’ writing fluency.(4)Integrated writing tasks can effectively improve students’ interest and enthusiasm in English writing.Some practical implications for teaching and learning were put forward based on the result of the study.