Effect of Story-Continuation Writing Task on High School Students’ Writing

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Introduction
The National New English Curriculum Standard for General High Schools (2022 edition) enacted by the Republic of China stresses the salient position of students' language ability, learning ability, thinking quality and cultural awareness, among which, language abilities are put on the paramount position.Meanwhile, English writing, the comprehensive manifestation of EFL students' language ability has been heatedly discussed and scholars have been exploring useful and effective ways to facilitate English writing for EFL learners as representatives by Professor Wang Chuming from "The Length Approach (2009) to Continuation or Reading-Writing integrated task (2012).The Story-Continuation Writing Task (hereafter SCWT), a novice and specific form of continuation task efficiently integrating language input and out, has gained popularity among Chinese EFL teaching and learning especially since it was first adopted in high-stake National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in Zhejiang Province in 2016.
A plethora of scholars and first-line teachers have enacted related theoretical researches towards SCWT, namely the theory of continuation (Wang, 2012), "Xu-argument" (Wang, 2016) Wang and multiple investigations have bloomed in the tertiary universities and crowds of studies focus on the theoretical aspect of story continuation.As for the empirical researches of story continuation, the related studies have bloomed in the tertiary universities.Previous studies have placed centeredness on the alignment and material use in story continuation and the research objects are mainly university students, for instance, the alignment effect of story continuation (Wang, 2014;Wang & Wang, 2014;Chen & Jiang, 2015;Miao, 2017;Cui & Yang, 2019;Wang, 2021), the source use and the construct of story continuation (Ye &Ren, 2019;Ye, Ren & Zheng, 2021) and the topic familiarity of story continuation (Gavin Bui & Luo, 2021).The extent researches concerning continuation mainly focus on the tertiary educational level for the research subjects are mainly undergraduate or postgraduate students.Moreover, the continuation writing task has become a brand trend in college entrance examination of English test in China.

Definition of Story-Continuation Writing Task
The conceptual framework centers on the key item of the Story-Continuation Writing Task (SCWT).The Story Continuation Writing Task (SCWT) is developed from the scenario model proposed by zwaan and Radvansky (1998).which asks the writer to read the beginning of the story, and then extend and complete the story in a reasonable way.It is a novice and concrete form of integrated writing task, namely, Continuation Task for which task-takers are provided with a text with its ending removed for learners to complete through writing in the most coherent and logical way possible (Wang and Wang 2015).Derided and developed from continuation task, similarly, Story-Continuation Writing Task (hereafter, SCWT) demands task-takers to create and compose the ending part of the story under the given text and complete the story as coherent and logic as possible.Lu (2021) regarded story-Continuation writing as an emerging type of integrated writing and creative writing.Specifically, according to Hu (2021), the Story-Continuation Writing Task, being a new form of an integrated reading-writing task, it requires students to read an essay of about 350 words, then to compose a passage of about 150 words according to the key words given and the opening words of the two paragraphs.A key criterion for SCWT is the connections within and between written text and source text.(Ye et al., 2021).In light of the criteria of SCWT, National Education Examinations Authority announced in 2020 that the scoring rubric for the Story-Continuation Writing Task applied in NMET has been examined, which focuses on mainly four aspects, including the connection of the source text and the opening sentences with the continuation, the richness of content and the use of key words underlined in the source text, the diversity and accuracy of grammatical structures and vocabulary use, and lastly the overall coherence.

Studies on Story-Continuation Writing Task
Amounts of scholars have been devoting to investigate the facilitating effects of SCWT in students' writing performance since its dawn.Reichlet (1997Reichlet ( , 2009) ) reported that German students use story continuation tasks in L1 and ESL classes and then he noted that story-continuation is a kind of "creative productive" writing with source responsibility.Hyland (2003) believed that this type of story ending writing task provides a framework for context, rhetorical structure and language output.Gebril (2009) argued that writers perform better with respect to organization in story continuation tasks than in independent writing, which she attributed to the modeling effect of the source text.Ann Sterling (2012) adopted the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology to exert an experiment on his 104 German students and the findings showed that the story-continuation necessitated that students focus on the characters and their intentions as well as the series of events to keep their continuation consistent with the source text.In terms of vocabulary strategies, the majority of students reported that they identified and looked up unfamiliar words that they could not infer from the context.
Scholars Xie (2009) and Zhang (2011) have verified through experiments of SCWT that students' writing performance can be improved.Zhao (2014) claimed that SCWT entails content learning in terms of English-speaking culture and critical thinking skills and she believed that SCWT possesses the potential for promoting knowledge construction and learning.The story continuation writing task (SCWT) is such a newly developed type of reading-writing integrated task, which is believed to be able to stimulate language learning efficiently (Wang, 2015;Wang & Wang, 2015).Further speaking, Jiang and Chen (2015) examined the longitudinal effects of writing practice over a semester and consequently, the SCWT was found to generate more gains on accuracy and complexity than the independent writing task.Jiang and Tu (2016) investigated 41 English major-freshmen from two parallel classes in a university in Guangzhou, via comparing teaching treatment of Summary-Writing and SCWT, they noted that the story-continuation task could more effectively improve English vocabulary learning, with a notable effect on semantics and usage.
Similarly, Peng et al. (2018) researched forty-seven freshmen English majors and eventually found that in story-continuation task with input complexity matching students' production level contributes to improve writing accuracy and fluency.Cui et al. (2019) enacted an experimental study towards sixty senior high school freshmen from a senior high school in Qingdao, and the consequences exhibited that the English-based story continuation task contributed to participants' fewer vocabulary-using errors, more proper linguistic structures and better writing quality.Xu (2020) exerted an empirical experiment on two linguistics-major postgraduates and found that in light of the alignment in vocabulary, from the transcripts the author found that the participants consciously used the strategy of choosing certain vocabulary to make their writing coherent with the previous reading, which indicated that story-continuation task contribute to students' correct words using to some extent.Gavin Bui and Luo (2021) exerted an experiment towards 91 students of grade7 in a middle school in Shenzhen and they found that participants in the story continuation groups significantly outperformed in the length of written texts and writing quality than those who were demanded to rewrite the whole story from the complete-story given group and further, story-continuation facilitates students' improvement of writing quality for it provides more room for creativity.
Ye (2021) used quantitative analysis to study the relationship between story continuation and national English language proficiency standards and grew a conclusion that SCWT is in line with the national demands of English course.Dai (2022) conducted teaching experiment and found that, compared with traditional topic-given writing task, story continuation tasks are conducive to stimulate or activate the creative thinking in conjunction with the imaginative thinking to a larger extent sine the continuation task offers test-takers more space to express their own thoughts.
In summary, most researches objects of Story Continuation are focused on the university students or even postgraduates with a few studies keeping senior or junior students getting involved.Through T-tests and Semi-structured interview, this paper attempts to investigate the effects of Story-Continuation Writing Task on senior students' writing performance and attitude.

Research Questions
This research intends to investigate senior students' English writing performance for High School Story-Continuation Writing.Further speaking, this research also aims to highlight the changes or promotion of senior students' English writing attitude after the adoption and practice of Story Continuation Writing Task.
This research focuses on answering the following questions: (1) What effects does Story-Continuation Writing Task exert on senior high school students' English writing performance?
(2) What effects would the application of Story-Continuation Writing Task in senior high schools exert on senior students' writing attitude?

Setting and Research Subjects
A total of 74 senior one students from a public senior high school in Shantou City, Guangdong province.These students are all from two parallel classes and they were randomly assigned to a Story Continuation Class (Experimental Class, Class 13, Num.37) & a Topic Writing Class (Control Class.Class 10, Num.37).These two classes roughly have the same English level.And almost all of the participants have learnt English for 6 years and thus they have already accumulated basic knowledge about English writing to some extent.Nevertheless, all the participants were from science class and they were in mediated English level.They were beginning learners of story continuation.

Instruments
Two kinds of instruments including questionnaires and English writing tests have been adopted in this research.The questionnaire1 was to explore participants' current situation of English writing, the understanding and perceptions towards Story-Continuation Writing Task whereas questionnaire2, with the same question items as questionnaire1, was adopted to elicit participants' changes of attitude and opinions towards SCWT.Meanwhile, two test (Independent Sample t-test & Paired Sample test) were utilized to explore the effect of Story-Continuation Writing Task on senior students' writing performance.

Questionnaires
Questionnaire I was contrived to help the author have a preliminary understanding of participants' attitude towards Story-Continuation Writing Task (SCWT) and the survey is consisted of 14 multiple choices within four parts (see Table1).A Five-Likert Scale was adopted (from 1 Strongly agree, 2 agree, 3 Uncertain, 4 Disagree to 5 Strongly disagree).Before sending the survey to the participants, the reliability and validity of it have been tested.Questionnaire I was sent to the participants before Pre-test while the questionnaire II, with the same question items, was distributed to the participants from Experimental Class to finish after treatment so as to explore whether the attitude of participants towards SCWT from Experimental Class have gotten improved or not after receiving twelve-weeks' teaching interference of Story-Continuation Writing Task.Firstly, the author collected the data of students' writing scores after being rated by the two experienced teachers according to the rating rubrics of National Matriculation English Test towards story continuation.Secondly, the writer inserted the data to SPSS to calculate the normality and homogeneity of the pre-test story continuation by using one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Independent Sample t-test respectively.The Independent-Sample T Test and Paired-Sample T Test have been utilized in this research.Thirdly, after the treatment, this test was also utilized to compare whether there exists significant difference between the post-test of experimental and Control Class.Moreover, the Paired-Sample T Test was adopted after the treatment by the author to investigate whether or not a significant improvement has occurred in the students' writing performance of both the experimental and Control Classes.

Procedure and Data Analysis
This research, which began on August 26th, 2022 and ended on November 25th, 2022, was mainly divided into three stages (see Table 2 ).The first stage conducted on the first week was the preparation of the study, the research subjects were selected.Further, the teaching material of Story-Continuation Writing Task and Topic-Writing was prepared.The research instruments were designed and improved including questionnaires, pretest and posttest and interview questions.The second stage was the implementation of this research, in which 12-weeks' treatment of SCWT and Topic-Writing were exerted respectively in Experimental Class and Control Class.The third stage enacted on the last week was the summary stage, in which the post test was took by all the 74 participants, followed by the Question II and semi-structured interview enacted in Experimental Class and all the data of posttest were carefully gleaned on this stage.Before the treatment, all the material needed were specially designed for both Story-Continuation Class and Topic-Writing Class.Participants in Experimental Class were assigned a Story-Continuation Writing Task while participants in Control Class were arranged a Topic-Writing Task every two weeks, in which students were asked to complete their tasks for the first week and the next week the English teacher would give evaluations and explanations.

Classroom Teaching Design During Treatment
For the 45-minute English writing class, the teacher had designed different teaching activities for both Experimental Class (see Table 3) and Control Class (see Table 4) and the teaching proceeds of the two class were consistent and under control by the teacher.The specific and concrete teaching design of Experimental Class and Control Class could be seen in Table3 and Table 4.

Step1
The teacher leads in the background information of the story via multimedia and students guess about what's happening in the story.

Step2
Students read the given text of the story, explore the key elements and analyze the developmental process of the story.

Step3
Students predict the following plot and the ending of the story and appreciate the emotional line, logic line as well as language use of the text.

Step4
Students' creation and completion of their own stories.

Step5
Peer feedback and teacher feedback.
Step6 Summary and Conclusion.

Step1
The teacher presents the learnt knowledge and students have a review of the grammar focus and sentence structures they have learnt.

Step2
Students read the writing material, answer the required questions and find out the topic sentences.

Step3
Students work in groups, discuss the writing topic and have a brainstorming about their own ideas for their writing.

Step4
Students' write their own compositions according to the requirements.

Step5
Students have a self-editing & peer editing Step6 Summary and Conclusion.

Data Collection and Analysis After Treatment
Firstly, before the treatment, participants' written texts of pre-test and questionnaire 1 were gleaned.During the treatment, 6 times' written practice of SCWT from Experiment Class and 6 times' written text of Topic-writing were collected.Lastly, after the treatment, the post-test scores of these two classes were gathered and questionnaire2 were conducted towards Experiment Class and the data was also collected.
For data analysis, the researcher used the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 26. .0 0 0 Before sending the survey to the participants, the reliability and validity of it have been tested.For one thing, the questionnaire's reliability was manifested by Cronbach's Alpha, and the final value was 0.887, exceeding the acceptable percentage of Cronbach Alpha coefficient 0.7, which means that the survey is highly reliable.Meanwhile, the validity of this survey was verified via KMO and Bartlett's coefficient, in which the value is 0.742, which is beyond the acceptable percentage of 0.6 and the value of significance coefficient is 0.00, being less than 0.05.Hence, the survey possesses both reliability and validity.

The Survey Data
14 items of multiple choices within four parts were concluded in this questionnaire and a Five-Likert Scale was adopted (from 1 Strongly agree, 2 agree, 3 Uncertain, 4 Disagree to 5 Strongly disagree).Part1 consisted 6 items and the results were as follows.After the treatment, Question II, with the same items as Question I, was arranged to participants from Continuation Class, and the results are presented as follows.The above chart demonstrated that only 44.06% participants showed positive attitude towards English learning while other participants showed uncertain or even negative attitude towards English writing despite the fact that about one third students (33.84%) acclaimed that the current English writing is helpful for improving their English writing.A larger percent of students (78.38%) admitted that they would have difficulties in English writing and most participants (83.79%) felt worried about their English writing.Besides, just a small part of the students (35.55%) had accumulated English writing material that benefited their writing and just 24.32% of the participants would practice English writing initiatively after class.From the above data, it was safe to conclude that before receiving the treatment of SCWT, many participants show uncertain or even negative opinions towards English learning and English writing.
After the treatment of SCWT, more than half (57.23%) participants loved English and 52.04% students showed their love for English writing, higher than 44.06% and 33.84% respectively before treatment.Moreover, nearly a half (44.04%) participants considered that English writing was not so difficult for them, higher than 21.72% before treatment.39.28% students were not worried when writing English, better than 16.21 before treatment.
When it came to the initial study, after treatment, 43.57% students were willing to accumulated English writing material that is beneficial for their own writing, obviously higher than 35.55% before receiving SCWT.44.04% students claimed that they would practice English writing initiatively after class after the treatment of SCWT, higher than 24.32 collected before treatment.These all diaplayed the fact that, the current situation of English writing of participants from Experimental Class became better and evidently got improved after the treatment of SCWT, which manifested that the enact of SCWT improved participants' attitude towards English writing class.Part3 contained three questions (Q9-Q11) and it tested students' understanding of SCWT before treatment.The results showed that only 27.02% students had a clear mind about story continuation or SCWT while most participants hadn't.Less than one third of the students show interest in story continuation whereas 72.98% students had no interest in SCWT.When it came to the story sharing in class, 67.57% participants were unsure or even unwilling to share their continuation stories in class.Comprehensibly speaking, these conditions emerged due to the fact that participants in the research were science students and they began learning story continuation for several months.After treatment, most students 61.19%) understood what is story continuation (SCWT), significantly higher than 27.02% before treatment.Further, about a half of the participants showed their interest to SCWT and 48.33% students were willing to share their continuation stories in class, better than 27.02% and 32.43% respectively before treatment.All these conditions embodied that more participants had a better understanding of SCWT after treatment.As for part4, Q12 to Q14 were included and the results shed light on the fact that less than a half of the participants positively considered that SCWT would help to enrich writers' writing content while 58.65% students didn't have the same thought.Still 58.14% participants embodied uncertain and negative thoughts towards the useful functions of promoting language expressions (tense, voice, words chosen and etc.) achieved by the adoption of SCWT.Less than a half of the participants viewed that SCWT would help them to master the whole structure of the whole passage since they were not so familiar with this new English writing form and hence, they were not so certain about the facilitating effect of SCWT.
After the treatment, when it came to the benefits of SCWT, most participants noticed the functions and benefits of story continuation task as 69.14% participants agreed that SCWT would help to enrich their writing content, 63.76% students claimed that SCWT benefited their English writing in terms of vocabulary use, grammar tense, voice and etc., and 73.14% participants agreed that SCWT helped them to better master the structure of the passage.The percentages of agree with regard to these three questions had improved marvelously compared with 41.35%, 41.86% and 46.76% respectively before treatment.

Pre-test Analysis
A writing task (See appendix III) was utilized and delivered to all the 74 participants (Experimental Class,37 & Control Class,37) and they were demanded to finish the story for about 150 words within 30 minutes given by the teacher.The total score of this task is 25 points and all the written texts were rated by two experienced teachers with more than eight years' experience of English teaching.The rating rubrics could be seen in appendix II and the pre-test story-continuation task can be seen in appendix II.The results are shown as follows.The above Table 16 showed that the mean scores of Experimental Group and Control Group were 6.649 and 6.986 respectively and Table 5 demonstrated the Independent Sample t-test showed that the sig.(2-tailed) were 0.584, clearly higher than 0.05 for both Experimental and Control Class, which contended that there was no significance difference between the Experimental Class and Control Class, and the writing level of story continuation of these two classes were almost the same before given treatment by the writer and thus the writing performance of story continuation for these two classes was comparable, which paved the way for the following process of exerting treatment of story continuation.
Starting on September 2 nd , 2022 and lasting for about 12 weeks, the treatment of story continuation writing was conducted on every Friday afternoon English Writing Class for 40 minutes.Two weeks was a round in which the first week was arranged for students' practice of story continuation while the next week was prepared for teacher's analysis, evaluations and students' discussions and peer feedback.The specific material of SCWT was shown as follows.

Post-test Analysis
The post-test of SCWT was conducted after the week of treatment, for which, another writing task (see appendix IV) with the similar difficulty level as the one given in the pre-test was assigned to both the Experimental Class (37 students) and Control Class (37 students) and results were displayed in the following tables.The results above displayed showed that the post-test mean scores of Experimental and Control Group was 7.189 and 10.162 respectively and the mean difference between these two groups was 2.716 and thus the post test scores of these two groups were distinctly different.-The continuation develops the story with rich content and is well-connected to the main ideas of the source text and the opening sentences.
-The continuation uses accurate and diverse grammatical structures and vocabulary, with occasional errors that do not affect comprehensibility.
-The continuation is well-structured and coherent.Sentences within paragraphs are effectively connected to each other with appropriate, well-selected, and varied transition words and other cohesion devices.
Band 4 16-20 -The continuation develops the story with adequate content and is connected to the main ideas of the source text and the opening sentences.
-The continuation uses relatively accurate and diverse grammatical structures and vocabulary with few errors that do not affect comprehensibility.
-The continuation is structured and coherent.Sentences within paragraphs are effectively connected to each other with appropriate and varied transition words and other cohesion devices.
Band 3 11-15 -The continuation develops the story with some relevant content and is largely connected to the main ideas of the source text and the opening sentences.
-The continuation uses a variety of grammatical structures and vocabulary with some errors that do not affect comprehensibility.
-The continuation is largely structured and coherent.Sentences within paragraphs are connected with simple transition words and other cohesion devices.
Band 2 6-10 -The continuation contains limited content and is somewhat relevant to the source text and the opening sentences.
-The continuation uses a limited range of grammatical structures and vocabulary with some errors that may affect comprehensibility.
-The continuation lacks structure and coherence.Sentences within paragraphs use limited transition words and other cohesion devices.
Band1 1-5 -The continuation contains limited content and demonstrates limited or no relevance to the source text and the opening sentences.
-The continuation uses a limited range of simple grammatical structures and vocabulary with many errors that affect comprehensibility.
-The continuation is not structured or coherent.Translation words and other cohesion deceives are inappropriate or missing.0 Blank, the content is too limited to be scored, or the content is not related to the source text at all.

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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Table 1 .
The procedure followed by the researcher

Table 2 .
The procedure followed by the researcher

Table 3 .
Classroom Teaching Design in Story-Continuation Class Teaching Design of SCWT in Experimental Class

Table 4 .
Classroom Teaching Design in Topic-Writing Class Teaching Design of SCWT in Control Class

Table 5 .
The Result of Reliability

Table 7 .
Students' current situation of English writing

Table 8 .
Students' attitude towards English writing class Q7&Q8) were consisted in part 2, which aimed to investigate students' attitude towards English Writing Class.About two thirds (67.57%) of the students showed uncertain or negative feelings towards English Writing Class.More than a half of the students weren't sure about whether or not their current English Writing Class is helpful for them.After the treatment of SCWT, more students show positive attitude towards English writing class as the percentage of love having English class was 52.85%, which was improved compared with 32.43% and 64.52% participants agreed that the current English writing class was conducive to improving their own English writing, increased by 23.06% compared with the data before treatment.They both manifested that the enact of SCWT improved participants' attitude towards English writing class.

Table 10 .
Students' perception towards the functions of SCWT

Table 11 .
Result of Normality Both Control and Experimental One Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test

Table 14 .
Post-test Group Statistics

Table 15 .
Post-test Independent Sample t-test.The Independent Sample T-test displayed that sig(2-tailed) was 0.000, lower than 0.05, which meant that there was a significant difference on students' English writing performance between the Experimental and Control group.After 12 week's treatment of SCWT, the average score of the Experimental group was 10.162 while the mean score of Control Class was7.189, which indicated that participants of Experimental group evidently outperformed than their counterparts from Control group.Ye, W., & Ren, W. (2019).Source use in the story continuation writing task.Assessing Writing, 39, 39-49.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2018.12.001Ye, W., Ren, W., & Zheng, S. (2021).The construct of the story continuation writing task: Insights from the China's standards of English language ability.Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 44(3), 382-398.https://doi.org/10.1515/CJAL-2021-0024