Integrating Authentic Context-Based High School English Grammar Instruction with Writing Continuation Tasks

——A Case Study on Narrative Text Sequencing via the Simple Past Tense

Abstract

Traditional high school English grammar teaching has long suffered from the problem of being detached from context and separating learning from application. Although students can memorize grammatical rules, they struggle to apply them flexibly in authentic writing. To address this contradiction, this paper takes the teaching of the simple past tense as an example to explore a grammar instructional design model that integrates authentic contexts, serialized stories, and continuation writing as output. Adopting a task-based teaching design approach, the study uses two letters to construct a serialized story context, around which a progressive task chain is designed—from grammar perception, focus on form, and rule induction to continuation writing output—with continuation writing serving as the final production stage of grammar instruction. Through the application of this design in high school English classroom teaching, observations of students' continuation writing works and classroom performance indicate that the serialized story context effectively stimulates students' narrative motivation. Most students are able to correctly use the simple past tense to narrate continuous events in their continuation of the third letter, with noticeable improvement in both grammatical accuracy and awareness of tense consistency. The findings suggest that grammar instruction driven by serialized story contexts can bridge the gap between grammatical rule learning and authentic language use. The continuation writing output task, as the production phase of grammar acquisition, demonstrates significant pedagogical effectiveness, and this design model provides a feasible innovative pathway for high school English grammar teaching.