A Study On The Alignment Effect Of Senior Three Students’ English Continuation Tasks

English writing is an important language output skill,which can reflect the level of students’ language ability.With the reform of college entrance examination education,the continuation task has become the main type of English writing in the new college entrance examination.General Senior High School Curriculum Standards(2017)also explicitly proposes to combine reading and writing in the process of language learning and develop language skills through comprehensive language practice activities.Although Wang Chuming(2012)points out that the continuation task has alignment effect and learning promotion effect,which can reduce language errors and improve language fluency and complexity,the average score of continuation tasks in the new college entrance examination is still low.Therefore,it’s worth exploring to investigate present situation of senior high school students’ continuation tasks in order to improve their writing level.Based on the theory of interactive alignment,this study adopts the methods of data statistics and corpus.It takes the senior three students of a high school in Zhangzhou City as the subjects and collects continuation tasks of the mid-term examination of 5 parallel classes in senior three.There are 210 continuation tasks for corpus construction.This research explores three questions:(1)How is the lexical and syntactic alignment effect of the continuation task of senior three students? Do students at different levels have different alignment at lexical and syntactic levels?(2)How about the language errors of senior three students’ continuation tasks? Are there any differences among three different levels on language errors?(3)Are language errors related to alignment effect? If relevant,what is the situation?The results show that:(1)There is a strong alignment effect at lexical level in continuation tasks of senior three students.There is a significant difference among three levels and the alignment effect at lexical level is stronger at lower level.There are full and partial syntactic alignment in continuation tasks of senior three students,and partial syntactic alignment rate is higher.There are significant differences in full and partial syntactic alignment among three different levels,and the lower the level is,the stronger the syntactic alignment effect is.(2)Of the language errors in the continuation task of senior three students,tense error rate is the highest,and form-based error rate is higher than meaning-based error rate.There are significant differences in non-finite verbs,tenses and Chinglish among different level groups.In non-finite verbs and tenses,the error rate of low-level group is the lowest.(3)Language errors are negatively correlated with alignment effect,and so are the form-based errors in language errors.The stronger the alignment effect is,the fewer the form-based errors are.Based on the results of this study,the author puts forward some suggestions for the teaching of the continuation task from three aspects: to cultivate students to find the key words of the original text in the continuation task,to imitate and use the syntactic structure of the original text creatively,and to strengthen students’ awareness of alignment in the continuation task.