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

Textual coherence is an essential criterion for evaluating texts.Nevertheless,in English writing,senior high school students often pay more attention to language form and ignore coherence,making it tough to enhance student's overall level of writing.In 2012,based on the input and output hypothesis theories,and interactive alignment model,Wang Chuming proposed a new type of writing activity,named the Continuation Task,which refers to writing the continuing parts of a given reading material.In 2016,it appeared in the second part of the English composition for the college entrance examination of Zhejiang Province.Some experiments focusing on college students have verified that the Continuation Task positively impacts students' English writing,mainly embodied in vocabulary,syntactic structure,textual coherence and other text features.However,few empirical studies have concentrated on the Continuation Task's effects on senior high school students' writing coherence.Based on this background,this study explores the impact of the Continuation Task on the coherence of senior high school students' English writing from an empirical perspective.This research aims to address the following three questions:(1)What effect does the Continuation Task have on the coherence of senior high school students' English writing at the lexical level?(2)What effect does the Continuation Task have on the coherence of senior high school students' English writing at the syntactic level?(3)What effect does the Continuation Task have on the coherence of senior high school students' English writing at the textual level?In an effort to tackle the issues above,the author selected two parallel classes of Grade 1 from a senior high school as the experimental subjects.The experimental class was trained with the Continuation Task,while the control class was trained with traditional propositional writing.In every writing class,the experimental class was trained to draw a mind-map to show the development of the event in the given reading material and predict what would happen next,shown in Appendix C,after which they started to write the continuing parts.The control class was trained with propositional writing in every writing class every week.The author conducted a pre-test and post-test for the participants,respectively.The author collected the students' compositions,processed them with a corpus processing tool Coh-Metrix,and then focused on observing the changes in the corresponding indices of students' writing coherence at three different levels.The results show that:(1)At the lexical level,the Continuation Task enables students to use more concrete and meaningful words,more explicit content words,and matching personal pronouns,making reading effortless and improving English writing coherence;(2)At the syntactic level,the Continuation Task encourages the use of connectives such as causal,logical,temporal,and other connectives during the process of English writing,making the students' English writing more coherent;(3)At the textual level,the Continuation Task enhances narrativity,logical connections within the text,helps create more conceptually similar sentences to every other sentence in the text,prompts consistent tense and aspect and improves the second language readability scores,boosting the writing coherence.This research supports the previous researchers' belief that the Continuation Task has the effect of promoting learning and provides valuable inspiration for senior high school English writing teaching,significantly improving students' writing coherence.