| Since being first included in the college entrance examination of Zhejiang Province in 2016,continuation task,a writing method based on the theory of interactive and collaborative mode,has gradually become the main training mode for the teaching of English writing in senior high schools.As stipulated in the " National English Curriculum Standards for General High School(2020)",writing is an essential part of English teaching in high school.However,English teachers still face many problems when they teach writing,such as learners’ contempt for the importance of writing,learners’ lack of interest in writing,and learners’ inability to effectively organize language.Even for learners who do not have those problems,troubles such as the separation of input and output,and the separation of writing from context are also common and continue to plague teachers and students.Previous domestic experiments on the effect of continuation task have proven that continuation task can promote learners to interact with input text,thereby generating the alignment to promote foreign language learning.However,previous studies have also found that learners’ interaction with reading materials is not entirely automatic.In relevant teaching practices,the main reason why the effect of continuation task is not as good as expected is the weak alignment caused by insufficient interaction between learners and reading materials.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore whether the continuation task training guided by input enhancement can improve the interaction between learners and reading materials,thereby enhancing the alignment,and achieving the goal of improving the effect of continuation task.This study took two parallel classes in the first grade of a senior high school in Harbin as the experimental subjects,with Class A as the control class and Class B as the experimental class.Each class had 42 subjects,a total of 84 subjects.At the same time,under the guidance of input enhancement,this study conducted an 8-week writing training for the subjects,during which a total of three tests,including pretest,mid-test,and posttest,along with questionnaires and interviews.The purpose of this study was to address three questions:(1)What problems do the subjects currently have in the continuation task?(2)Can input enhancement improve the problems of subjects ’ language accuracy and complexity in the continuation task?(3)Can applying input enhancement to continuation task training improve its learning effect?After three months of teaching experiments and analyzing experimental data,the main findings of this study are:(1)There are generally significant problems with the accuracy and complexity of subjects’ writing language.Based on the results of the pretest,the author found that there were generally significant problems with the accuracy of the subjects’ writing language from the perspective of the mean value of the subjects’ language form errors(experimental class=1.701,control class=1.706)and semantic errors(experimental class=0.612,control class=0.608);From the mean value of the standardized class symbol/type symbol ratio(experimental class=0.435582,control class=0.435439),the lexical complexity of the subject’s articles is not high,which can be inferred that the subject’s vocabulary is generally insufficient;According to the ratio of the total number of clauses to the total number of T units in the subject’s article(experimental class=1.814,control class=1.813)and the ratio of the total number of dependent clauses to the total number of clauses(experimental class=0.391,control class=0.390),the syntactic complexity of the subject’s article is low,which can be inferred that the subject’s syntactic level is low.(2)Applying input enhancement to continuation task training can effectively enhance the attention of subjects to language forms,enhance their interaction with reading materials,and improve the accuracy of their language output,but it has no significant impact on language complexity.Based on the analysis of the data from the mid test and post test,the author found that there was a significant difference in the rate of language form errors between the experimental class and the control class in the mid test and post test(t=-2.046,df=32,p=0.004,t=-1.875,df=44,p=0.039),but there was no significant difference in semantic errors between the two classes(t=-0 971,df = 49,p = 0.527,t =-0.823,df = 39,p = 0.488).The statistical results showed that the standardized class symbol/type symbol ratio(t=0.05)of the vocabulary complexity index in the articles of the experimental class and the control class(t=0.191,df = 49,p= 0.849,t = 0.103,df=43,p=0.721)and the ratio of the total number of dependent clauses to the total number of clauses(C/T: t=-1.482,df = 41,p = 0.186,t =-1.763,df= 33,p = 0.236;DC /C: t =-1.037,df = 39,p = 0.683,t =-0.757,df = 42,p = 0.473)showed no significant difference.This indicates that input enhancement instruction for the continuation task training has no significant impact on improving language complexity.(3)Applying input enhancement to the continuation task training can enhance the learning effect of the continuation task,and the effect is significant.Based on the data analysis of the mid test and post test,the author finds that: First,the writing performance of the experimental class has improved more than that of the control class.Among them,the writing performance of the experimental class(mid test=15.63,post test=15.99)was higher than that of the control class(mid test=14.91,post test=15.08),and the increase in these two tests was also higher than that of the control class(experimental class: mid test=0.98,post test=0.36;control class: mid test=0.26,post test=0.17).Secondly,the alignment of subjects and reading materials in the experimental class were greater than those in the control class.Among them,the words university,watched,back,Cheerful,box,worked,future,learned,and fair that have a driving effect on the plot of the story appeared more frequently in the articles of the experimental group than in the control group,and the differences were significant(log-likelihood=6.53,,8.44,6.01,7.32,7.59,6.59,5.44,3.59,8.13;p=0.005,0.004,0.012,0.010,0.004,0.009,0.172,0.318,0.003);The grammatical structures of repeated occurrence in the reading materials such as "coordinate sentences","It was Time to do","prepositions+gerunds","parentheses",and "attributive clauses" in the experimental group was more frequent than in the control group,and the differences were significant(log-likelihood=3.23,2.53,5.71,2.24,4.41;p=0.038,0.062,0.03,0.069,0.043).This indicates that applying input enhancement to the continuation task training can enhance the lexical and syntactic alignment between the subject and the reading material.It can be seen that applying input reinforcement to continuation task training can improve its learning effect.However,there are still some shortcomings in this study,which need to be further explored and improved in the future. |
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