The Effects Of Learner's Consciousness On Alignment In Continuation Task

Over the past few years,alignment in language use has arouse considerable interest in the field of psycholinguistics and SLA research(Pickering and Garrod 2004;Atkinson et al.2007;Costa et al.2008).The concept of alignment generally refers to the process which human acts dynamically adapt to the ever-changing mindbody-world environments.The alignment takes place not just between human beings,but also between human beings and their social and physical environment.Wang(2010)firstly come up with the continuation task to illustrate the language alignment in SLA.According to him,the language alignment will be affected by various factors such as learner's individual difference,the language form of input and the learner's language ability.He pointed out that,from the perspective of alignment,the development of learner's language knowledge is facilitated by the enhancement of alignment between the learner and the language input.Therefore,the present study takes the textual input enhancement as the tool to raise learner's consciousness at target linguistic forms for checking whether the raising of learner's consciousness will affect the language alignment.Thus,one empirical study was conducted to illustrate the relationship between language alignment and learner's consciousness.In this study,two groups of 30 freshman non-English major students were asked to finish the continuation tasks under two different conditions: the textual input enhancement presents condition and the textual input enhancement absents condition,respectively.Each group continued the story following reading its input enhancement version and non input enhancement version.After the continuation task,a reading comprehension test and a questionnaire was also conducted to provide supplementary evidence.Results showed that(1)the raising of learner's consciousness to target linguistic form can enhance the alignment effects also improve the learner's language proficiency;(2)however simply adapt the textual input enhancement alone will not enable the learner to acquire new language knowledge,it might be helpful when specific instruction towards the new linguistic forms is provided.The findings of this study prove the effectiveness of raising the learner's consciousness to promote the effects of alignment in a continuation task,it also provides practical guidance for both English teaching and learning.