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

English writing plays an indispensable role in the development of learners' language competence and their acquisition of language knowledge.For senior high school students,English writing ability is also a key index to judge their comprehensive English level and college entrance examination results.However,in China,the current situation of English writing teaching in senior high schools is still not optimistic.The English writing level of senior high school students is generally lower than the standard of new curriculum standard.Problems such as vocabulary,sentence and layout frequently appear in their English writing,resulting in unsatisfactory writing effect.On the basis of the second-language acquisition theory,Professor Wang Chuming(2012)proposed a new writing teaching method:continuation writing.This kind of teaching method combines reading with writing,which means students need to continue writing the ending of a given text based on their reading comprehension.Therefore,based on the teaching practice of English writing in senior high school,this study aims to explore the specific effects of continuation task on senior high school students' English writing anxiety and writing achievement.The research mainly includes two questions:(1)Can continuation task significantly reduce the English writing anxiety of senior high school students?(2)Can continuation task significantly improve the English writing performance of senior high school students? The experiment lasts for 10 weeks.The experimental subjects are 102 students from two parallel classes in the first grade of a senior high school in Zhangzhou city,Fujian province.The two classes are randomly divided into experimental class and control class.The main findings of this study include the followings:First,the results of the questionnaire data on second language writing anxiety show that:after experiment,the average scores of students in experimental class and control class are2.9518 and 3.4721 respectively.The results of an independent sample t test show that the SIG of writing anxiety scores in these two classes is 0.000,which indicate that there is a significant difference in English writing anxiety in the two classes after experimental intervention.The students in experimental class have lower writing anxiety in three dimensions: somatic anxiety(3.0247),avoidance anxiety(3.0110)and cognitive anxiety(2.8197)than those in control class(3.4429,3.4886,3.4850).Therefore,it can be concluded that: continuation task is beneficial to reduce senior high school students' English writing anxiety,especially to alleviate their avoidance behavior and conception anxiety.Second,the questionnaire data about English writing achievement reveals that: after experiment,the average writing score of students in experimental class is 11.92,and control class is 10.18.An independent sample t test is conducted to test the average writing scores of the two classes.The results show that the SIG is 0.000,which indicate that there is a significant difference between the two classes after experimental intervention.The students in experimental class score higher in content(3.81),structure(4.04)and language(4.08)than those in control class(3.20,3.54,3.44).Therefore,it can be concluded that continuation task can help senior high school students improve their English writing performance,which is shown that continuation task plays an active role in promoting senior high school students to internalize and absorb language knowledge,clarify English writing ideas,and exert their own imagination so as to write creatively.In view of the above findings,the author suggests that teachers in senior high school should subconsciously strengthen the training of students in continuation task.However,there are still some deficiencies in this study,so further research is needed.