The Alignment Of Adjective In The Senior School Students’ English Continuation Task Under The Perspective Of Attitude System

The continuation task solves the dilemma of the limitations of foreign language teaching environment and lacking the actual language environment and opportunities for the EFL learners to interact with native speakers.It further promotes the language proficiency level of learners.The main reason for the learning facilitation of the continuation task is the alignment effect.Numerous researchers examine the alignment effect in the continuation task from different aspects such as alignment at the lexical level,at the syntactic level and at the discourse level,etc.However,there are only few studies on the alignment effect from the perspective of Attitude System,and little attention has been paid to Senior School students’ continuation task.Therefore,this study aims to examine the morphological and semantic alignment of adjectives in the Senior School students’ English continuation task under the perspective of Attitude System and the research questions are as follows.（1）From the perspective of Attitude System,does the morphological and semantic alignment of adjectives exist in Senior School students’ English continuation task?（2）If there is morphological and semantic alignment of adjectives,how do the adjectives achieve these alignments in Senior School students’ English continuation task?（3）Are there any differences between the morphological alignment and semantic alignment of the adjective in Senior School students’ English continuation task? What are any differences between them?30 third-year students of one parallel class in some Senior School are invited in this study,which is randomly selected from Shaoguan,Guangdong Province.The experiment lasts for 4 weeks.In the first week,the participants take the proposition writing,which has the same theme with the continuation task applied in the fourth week.In the second and third week,the participants have the practice of the continuation task.In the fourth week,the participants have the final contianution task.They are provided a reading material whose ending is removed to finish it.At the end of the experiment,two small corpora are yielded according to the types of writing,each of which has 30 compositions.Finally,two researchers classify the compositions of the two corpora respectively on the level of adjective morphology and semantics.By applying Antconc 3.4 to do the word frequency statistics and SPSS 26.0 to do the One-Sample t Test,Independent-Samples t Test,Paired-Samples t Test and MannWhitney U Test to analyze the data,the results are as follows:（1）From the perspective of Attitude System,there is morphological and semantic alignment of adjectives existing in Senior School students’ English continuation task.（2）From the perspective of Attitude System,there are two ways for participants to achieve the morphological and semantic alignment of adjectives: first,repeat the adjectives used in the reading material;second,create and use adjectives that share the same form and attitude in the reading material and their semantic meanings are similar or different.Besides,learners are more inclined to the first way.As attitudinal resources,adjectives are more inclined to use to express positive attitude.（3）From the perspective of Attitude System,there is a difference between the morphological alignment and semantic alignment of adjectives in Senior School Students’ English continuation task: the semantic alignment of adjectives is stronger than morphological alignment of adjectives.However,in general,there is no significant difference between them,which is because the alignment of semantics triggers the alignment of morphology.This study expands not only the perspective of foreign language teaching from the perspective of Attitude System,but also the perspective of examining the alignment effect in the continuation task.Moreover,it gives some implications for the foreign language teaching: first,teachers can promote learners’ vocabulary learning through the continuation task;second,teachers should focus on both morphology and semantics in vocabulary teaching;third,teachers can cultivate learners’ cultural literacy through the continuation task.