The Investigation Of Alignment Effect In L2 Written Production

Alignment effect has aroused considerable interest in second language learning in the past few years.The existence of alignment effect in story continuation writing tasks prompts language learners to understand the event in question better and aids students in acquiring greater language proficiency.This thesis reports an experiment looking into the effect of alignment of situation model on alignment of linguistic representations and the relation of situation model and meaning-related expressions in writing.Sixty-nine subjects from a university in Shanghai participated in the experiment.They were divided into 3 groups.The first group read the Chinese-version of a story and finished the continuation in English.The second group read the English-version of the same story and finished the continuation in English.The third group read the English-version of the same story,then finished a reading comprehension exercise concerning key dimensions of the situation model and finished the continuation in English.The writings of the three groups were meticulously analyzed.The results show that: 1.Repetitive element occurs at the lexical,phrasal,and clausal level,which demonstrates that lexical alignment,phrasal alignment,and clausal alignment do exist;2.With the situation model strengthened,alignment at the phrasal and clausal level is more diverse and complex while lexical alignment shows no great difference;3.With the situation model strengthened,phrase meaning errors and sentence meaning errors are substantially reduced while word meaning errors and discourse meaning errors are slightly reduced;4.Meaning is closely associated with situation model and the more similar the situation model built by second language learners is to the original text,the fewer meaning-related errors are made.Theoretically,this study testifies to some extent the Interactive Alignment Model.Alignment of situation model has a positive effect on that of linguistic representations.In practice,this study enlightens teachers that they can promote English learning of students by focusing on situation model.