An Empirical Study On Iterative Continuation In Teaching English Writing In Junior High School

As the development and improvement of domestic English teaching in junior high school,the English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education(Ministry of Education,2022)put forward that students’ overall language ability should be cultivated to lay a foundation for authentic communication.Writing teaching plays an important role in developing students’ overall language ability.Although some English teachers have spent a mass of time and effort in the topic-given writing training,the results are not as good as expected.Students cannot improve their writing scores and naturally lose the English writing interest.Thus,how to effectively teach English writing has recently become the research focus.In 2012,Wang Chuming proposed the continuation task as an effective method of language acquisition,later in 2018 Wang further proposed the iterative continuation to enhance the effect of interactive alignment in continuation task.Inspired by previous studies on continuation task and iterative continuation,this study takes language input hypothesis,language output hypothesis and interactive alignment model as theoretical basis,applies the iterative continuation into English writing teaching in junior high school and raises three research questions listed as follows:(1)What is the effect of iterative continuation on English writing motivation in junior high school?(2)What is the effect of iterative continuation on English writing performance in junior high school?(3)Compared to traditional writing teaching,what do students think of iterative continuation?To answer the research questions above,this study selects 70 students from Grade8 in Beijing Fangshan 401 School as research subjects.During the twelve-week experiment,the experimental class(Class 1)adopts the iterative continuation method,while the control class(Class 2)adopts the traditional topic-given writing teaching method.In this study,the author collects both quantitative data and qualitative data utilizing three research instruments,questionnaire,writing test and semi-structured interview.Later,the research data was organized and analyzed with the help of SPSS25.0.Based on the data analysis and results,several findings are presented below:(1)Students’ English writing motivation in the experimental class has improved significantly compared to the control class,thus the iterative continuation has positive effect on junior students’ writing motivation,especially on deep motivation and achieving motivation.(2)Students’ English writing performance in the experimental class,which was taught with the iterative continuation,significantly exceeds those in the control class,thus the iterative continuation has facilitating effect on junior students’ writing performance.Besides,the improvement in the structure dimension is more significant than that in the content and language dimension.(3)Most students in the experimental class hold positive attitudes towards the iterative continuation,and suggest that the selection of reading material and the time arrangement of writing class can be further developed and improved.At last,the author proposes some implications and suggestions for further pedagogical practice and research of iterative continuation,expecting that English teachers and researchers could pay more attention to the selection of continuation reading materials making full use of the English textbooks and to the learners’ factor impacting the facilitating effect of iterative continuation.