The Study Of Alignment In The L2 Continuation Task Based On Topic Familiarity

In recent years,a series of studies have elaborated that the continuation task,in which students show clear tendency to align language use with what they have read when continuing an in-complete second language(L2)text,can improve their writing performance and then facilitate their L2 learning.Topic familiarity is an essential variable influencing the process of language comprehension and its subsequent acquisition.However,few research has been conducted to find out its effects on alignment in the continuation task.Therefore,topic familiarity was studied in this research to explore whether and to what extent the alignment at discourse level and error rates are different when learners are asked to continue a familiar L2 text and an unfamiliar L2 text respectively.To answer the questions above,an empirical study via the continuation task was designed and then conducted,including two L2 input texts with one was chose as the familiar input text(The Emperor’s New Suit)and the other the unfamiliar input text(The Silver Shilling).Forty-eight non-English majors participated in this study during two weeks and each of them continued the two texts both.Then all students’ writing productions were collected and three kinds of analyses were conducted between the two groups of continuations:firstly,comparing the alignment of words and four-word phrases by employing AntConc 3.4.1;secondly,comparing the linguistic coherence and content coherence by employing Coh-Metrix 3.0;thirdly,comparing error numbers and error rates by labeling and classifying the errors that students made.The major findings of the present research showed that:(1)After reading a familiar story,learners’ alignment at discourse level can be enhanced significantly.That is,learners would align more with the original story at lexical and phrasal level.Besides,the linguistic coherence and content coherence in their writings can be enhanced.(2)Learners who write after reading a familiar story would make significantly fewer errors in general than reading an unfamiliar story.In specific,the rate of meaning-based errors in the familiar continuation task reduced significantly while the rates of form-based errors didn’t show a significant differencebetween the two tasks.Overall,this study proves that topic familiarity of the input texts is an important factor causing impacts on alignment in the L2 continuation task.Besides,how topic familiarity affects alignment is also presented.It is hoped that the findings of this study could contribute to the design of L2 learning task,helping teachers arrange a more suitable continuation task.The selecting of more familiar materials for students can facilitate alignment effects,thereby promoting their language acquisition.