The Effects Of Comparative Continuation On The Coherence Of Senior High School Students’ English Writing

As one of the basic output skills in English learning,writing occupies a large proportion in high school English test,and plays an irreplaceable role in China’s middle school English education.In 2012,Wang Chuming’s "continuation writing" aroused widespread concern in the educational field.A large number of empirical studies have proved its effectiveness in English writing.The new writing method "comparative continuation" proposed by Wang in 2016 is another innovative attempt after"continuation writing".As a variant of continuation writing,comparative continuation strengthens the interaction between students’ writing and reading material with a large number of back-reading,and then the generation of synergy can be promoted.Comparative continuation makes up for the shortcomings of insufficient interaction intensity and limited styles of previous continuation writing.Due to the short time for the proposal of comparative continuation,the relevant studies are relatively scarce,and most of the research subjects are college students.Therefore,in combination with the teaching practice of English writing,this paper carried out an empirical study of comparative continuation in senior high school,and students’ writing coherence were divided into structural coherence and content-specific coherence(Reimer&Reimer,2015).The thesis aims to explore the following four research questions:1.What is the effect of comparative continuation on the structural coherence of senior high school students’English writing?2.What is the effect of comparative continuation on the content-specific coherence of senior high school students’English writing?3.What is the correlation between structural coherence and students’ writing scores?4.What is the correlation between content-specific coherence and students’ writing scores?This study adopts the methods of test and interview.The teaching experiment is conducted with two parallel classes in the first grade of senior high school.CC adopted the traditional proposition writing type,and EC adopted the "comparative continuation" mode.The experiment lasted for two months.Structural coherence and content-specific coherence mentioned above were analyzed from six cohesion indicators respectively.The changes of the twelve indicators of writing coherence before and after the teaching experiment in EC and CC were further investigated by Coh-Metrix text research tool.The two writing scores of the pretest and post-test were imported into SPSS for data analysis.The results indicated that comparative continuation has different effects on the six indicators of structural coherence,and the most obvious one is syntactic simplicity.Compared with structural coherence,content-specific coherence in EC improved more significantly,especially in terms of connectivity and verb cohesion.The "comparative continuation" writing model can be effectively applied to the teaching of English writing in senior high schools,and can produce better results in promoting learning.At the same time,the application of comparative continuation can significantly improve students’ English writing scores from the perspectives of structural coherence and content-specific coherence,and make students’writing scores more stable.In addition,based on the content of the interview,the author found that comparative continuation can also promote students’ English writing motivation and attitude to a certain extent.It contains the functions of alleviating students’ writing anxiety,enabling students to develop better writing and English learning habits,and contributing to better knowledge understanding and academic performance.Finally,the author proposed pedagogical implications of "comparative continuation" to promote further development of "Continuation" theory.Firstly,the improvement of teachers’teaching literacy is the foundation for students to understand and apply the knowledge point of material,and thus teachers should update their knowledge at all times.Secondly,it is better to find the material of comparative continuation that meets the actual levels of students.Thirdly,writing coherence has a certain degree of impact on students’ scores,and teachers should pay close attention to it in order to improve students’ writing performance.