Effects Of Comparative Continuation Task On Senior High School Students’ Practical English Writing

Comparative continuation task（CC task）is an advanced variant of continuation task in which students are instructed to create their own composition by imitating an excellent source text actively.Though increasing attention has been paid to improving students’writing performance by applying CC task few studies have been done to investigate the effects of CC task on senior high school students’ practical English writing performance.The New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School（revised in 2020）requires that students should be able to grasp the basic format,structure and linguistic features of common practical English writing used in daily life,which is one of the two writing tasks in the College Entrance Examination for English.However,students usually learn to write practical English writings in a passive way under the traditional writing pedagogy.To change the current situation,the researcher tries to figure out the effect of CC task on senior high school students’ practical English writing performance.Based on Input hypothesis,Interactive alignment hypothesis and Output hypothesis,this current research intends to answer the following two questions:（1）What are the overall effects of CC task on senior high school students’practical English writing performance?（2）What are the effects of CC task on senior high school students’ practical English writing performance in terms of content,language and organization?Combined with both quantitative and qualitative research methods,this study firstly invited 84 senior high school students in Nanjing to take participation in an eight-week experiment.A pre-test was conducted to determine which class would be experiment group（EG）and which class was chosen to be control group（CG）.During the experiment,CC task was adopted in EG while the traditional teaching method was used in CG.After the six-week teaching experiment,a post-test was held and the quantitative data was analyzed by SPSS 16.0.Qualitatively,six students from EG were invited to be interviewed according to their post-test performance in terms of high,intermediate and low level,and the data was analyzed to discuss the underlying reasons behind the research results.The major findings are listed as follows:（1）CC task could effectively improve senior high school students’ practical English writing performance in general;（2）CC task could effectively improve students’ practical English writing performance in terms of content and language while it had no obvious function in improving students’ practical English writing performance in terms of organization.Three pedagogical implications are put forward based on the research findings.Firstly,teachers should play a leading role in helping students understand the source text in all respects,like content,language and organization.Secondly,in order to secure the quality of the input,the topic,the difficulty and the length of the source texts should be taken into consideration.Thirdly,students should be the center of CC task,while teachers act as a facilitator in the step of Writing in EG,which means that the teacher should not contribute too much.There are also some limitations in the research,for example,the number of the samples was limited,and the period of the treatment of CC task was short.In the future studies,the number of subjects and experimental period should be enlarged to improve the reliability and the validity of the research.