Washback Effects Of Jiangsu New NMET Continuation-task On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Learning

This study is undertaken to investigate the positive and negative washback effects of Jiangsu new NMET continuation-task on senior high school students’ writing learning methods,contents and attitudes.The theoretical bases are synergy effect,input hypothesis,output hypothesis.Lastly,the significance of the study is to maximize the positive washback effects and meanwhile minimize the negative ones based on the research results,and it is hoped that the goal of improving students’ comprehensive capability of language use can be achieved.This study aims to address the following research questions:1.What positive and negative washback effects does the new NMET continuation-task in Jiangsu province have on senior high school students’ writing learning methods?2.What positive and negative washback effects does the new NMET continuation-task in Jiangsu province have on senior high school students’ writing learning contents?3.What positive and negative washback effects does the new NMET continuation-task in Jiangsu province have on senior high school students’ writing learning attitudes?The instruments adopted in this study are a student questionnaire,two rounds of interviews and a classroom observation scale.Firstly,the questionnaire which aims to investigate students’ writing learning methods,contents and attitudes,is adapted from Qi’S(2004)and Shi’s(2018)questionnaires about studies on washback effect of the NMET.Eight hundred senior high school students from Yancheng,Jiangsu province are selected as respondents,400 of whom are from a key senior high school and the other 400 are from an ordinary senior high school.Altogether 665 valid questionnaires are finally collected,and the data obtained are processed and analyzed with Microsoft Excel.Furthermore,taking 12 senior high school students from the two schools as respondents,the first-round interview is carried out to provide some reference for the design of the student questionnaire.While the second-round interview is conducted after collecting the questionnaire data to further explore and analyze the data obtained by interviewing 8 students from the two senior high schools.Both interviews are conducted in Chinese,and with the consent of the respondents,the interviews are recorded for further analysis and research.Lastly,a classroom observation scale is designed based on the research questions and is then employed to record the authentic classroom teaching and learning of continuation-task from aspects of writing teaching methods,contents and student participation.With the consent of the teachers,all 9 lessons are videotaped for further analysis and research.The study yields the following major findings:Firstly,the new NMET continuation-task has some positive washback effects on senior high school students’ writing learning methods.According to the questionnaire results,70.53%of the respondents collect relevant writing materials actively and more than half of the respondents use spare time to practice continuation-task,indicating that continuation-task facilitates students to arrange more time for writing learning actively.This is largely because continuation-task is challenging for students,and so they must put a high value on it.Besides,75.03%of the subjects tend to read the original texts carefully and repeatedly so that they can make their compositions reasonable and coherent,showing that continuation-task enables students to foster good writing learning methods.Moreover,due to the fact that creative plots can get higher scores,continuation-task helps to cultivate students’creative thinking.And the new NMET continuation-task also has some negative washback effects on students’ writing learning methods.For instance,52.33%of the students never or seldom seek comments and suggestions on their writing and 38.65%of the respondents never or seldom revise their compositions,indicating that a mature writing teaching system of continuation-task has not come into being,leading to the ignorance of writing learning reflection.In addition,94.63%of the students want teachers to teach them advanced vocabulary,phrases,sentences,and most teachers do mainly focus on explaining linguistic knowledge.Secondly,the new NMET continuation-task has some positive washback effects on senior high school students’ writing learning contents.For instance,74.93%of the respondents hold that their writing learning contents are expanded since they have to learn about describing the story characters’ behaviors,inside feelings,emotions as well as plotting creatively.Moreover,students’ writing learning materials also become diversified since famous novels and interesting stories from newspapers,the Internet,etc.are adopted as teaching materials by teachers.The new NMET continuation-task also exerts negative effect on students’ writing learning contents.Language knowledge such as grammar,vocabulary,advanced sentences and so on still dominates students’ writing learning contents,which limits the cultivation of comprehensive language use ability to a certain degree.Thirdly,the new NMET continuation-task has some positive washback effects on senior high school students’ writing learning attitudes.According to the questionnaire results,62.11%of the subjects respond in the affirmative that continuation-task helps to heighten their writing learning interest and motivation.This result can be attributed to the fact that continuation-task usually adopts narrations and tells some interesting stories that are way more fun than given topics.Moreover,76.69%of the students recognize that continuation-task covers and measures more comprehensive knowledge,which enables them to take continuation-task seriously and contributes to building students’ positive attitudes towards writing learning.And the new NMET continuation-task also has some negative washback effects on students’ writing learning attitudes.Given that continuation-task is a new question type which students have never been exposed to before,67.06%of the students agree that continuation-task is more challenging and makes them feel under much stress.In addition,50.98%of the subjects deem that the purpose of learning continuation-task is to get high scores in the NMET for the lack of correct and accurate perception of it,indicating that these students’ writing learning motivation is external.Based on the findings presented above,feasible pedagogical suggestions are provided to maximize the positive washback effects and minimize the negative ones in terms of students’writing learning methods,contents and attitudes.First,teachers can improve students’writing learning methods by guiding students to actively and effectively practice continuation-task.Second,to diversify students’ writing learning contents,extracurricular reading materials should be adopted.Third,teachers should give weight to developing students’ positive attitudes towards continuation-task writing learning.Finally,the limitations of this study include a short research period,an insufficient sample size of interviewees and classroom observations,and also a failure to consider whether personal factors such as teachers’ educational backgrounds,teaching ages,genders,students’ genders,English proficiency,etc.have a bearing on the washback effects of the continuation-task.Given these limitations,the above findings need to be further verified.