The Effect Of The Continuation Tasks On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Proficiency

English writing has always been a difficult part in second language acquisition,which requires students to combine input with output.However,in the traditional English teaching in China,input and output are usually carried out separately.And the teaching of reading and writing are not close.The strength of Chinese learners is input oriented reading,while the output oriented writing is always their weakness.The continuation task is a new teaching mode in second language acquisition,which was proposed by Professor Wang Chuming in 2012.It combines reading with writing,combines language imitation with content innovation,and improves students’ writing ability through reading.However,the discussion mainly focuses on the theoretical level,or on college Students’ English writing level.Therefore,based on previous studies and theories,this study introduces the continuation task which applied in senior high school classroom,aiming to explore if the continuation task could help the middle school students make progress in writing aspect.This experiment is based on middle school students’ English writing ability on the basis of previous studies.This study mainly answers the following three questions:(1)In terms of the contents of writing,what is the effect of continuation task on middle school students’ writing proficiency?(2)In terms of the structure of writing,what is the effect of continuation task on middle school students’ writing proficiency?(3)In terms of the language accuracy of writing,what is the effect of continuation task on middle school students’ writing proficiency?In this experiment,there are 80 students from two classes of senior two in Zhouqu middle school in Lanzhou as the experimental subjects.The two classes have no significant difference,which were treated as control class and experimental class.Combined with the learning content and time arrangement of senior high school students,this experiment adopts pre-test,five experimental writing and post-test.The first stage is the pretest,the main purpose is about exploring whether there is any difference for the students in the two classes in writing level before the process of the experiment.The whole process of the second stage which is lasting for 10 weeks is the experimental stage.The experimental class uses the continuation task as the writing method,while the control class take the traditional proposition writing method as the teaching way.After the experiment,the author carried out a post-test to compare whether the two classes have changed after the experiment.During the experiment,students’ writing papers were collected,and three research questions were graded according to Jacobs’ scoring standard,which mainly focused on the three aspects of writing content,writing structure and language accuracy.Finally,SPSS was used for data sample analysis.According to the data analysis,conclusion could be made that the continuation task is helpful to improve students’ English writing ability.First,in terms of improving the contents of writing,the students in the EC with the application of the continuation task,they have made a great change in the writing content aspect.Second,in terms of improving the structure of writing,the students in EC with the application of the continuation task,they could easily imitate the structure in the original text,which is the authentic English writing structure.It would help the students to improve their writing ability in the design of structure.Third,in improving the language accuracy of writing,both of the two classes,they all made the progress in the words aspect,with the exercises of writing,the students could learn how to use the words with times of writing exercises,and the feedback of the teachers.However,there are some limitations in this study.First,for the number of the participants,the figure is too small for the empirical study.Second,the experiment lasted only for 10 weeks.All the subjects were senior high school students and were about to face the college entrance examination.Therefore,the experimental time was very limited.Third,the limitations of research methods,text analysis can be used to for the writing process,which is more convincing.Therefore,in the future similar research,the author will collect large sample data,conduct long-term in-depth research,adopt a variety of research methods,including text analysis,and strive to pay attention to the development process of students’ writing ability.