An Investigation Into The Effects Of Topic Familiarity On Senior High School Students’ Linguistic Performance And Alignment In The Continuation Task

Writing is the expression of the thoughts and the true reflection of the writer’s comprehensive language ability.English writing is not only a part of the college entrance examination,but also a difficult point in English teaching.From the current situation of high school English writing,students still have many problems in writing.Since the implementation of the new college entrance examination in 2016,Zhejiang has paid attention to the reform of English writing and introduced a new type of Continuation Task in the writing section.A series of related studies have proved that learners tend to reuse the language structures that have appeared in the reading text during the process of Reading-writing Continuation Task,resulting in alignment effects.Alignment effects can improve students’ writing level and promote second language acquisition.Topic familiarity is one of the important variables that affect learners’ language input processing and subsequent performance in the field of second language acquisition.Therefore,based on the input-output hypothesis and schema theory,this study takes topic familiarity as a variable to explore the following three issues:1.What are the effects of different topic familiarity on students’ linguistic performance(complexity,accuracy,fluency)in Continuation Task?2.What are the effects of different topic familiarity on alignment in Continuation Task?3.What is the relationship between the linguistic performance(complexity,accuracy,fluency)and the alignment effect under different topic familiarity?In order to answer the above questions,the author designed and implemented an empirical study on continuation task.The subjects of the study were students in a common class of a senior high school in Yiwu.The experimental materials included two texts selected according to the results of the student questionnaire.Then the author collected and statistically analyzed the two compositions of the subjects.The results showed that:Firstly,different topic familiarity will have a significant impact on the accuracy and fluency of students’ writing,mainly reflected in the fact that the accuracy and fluency of texts with high topic familiarity are significantly higher than those with low topic familiarity.Secondly,no matter whether students are familiar with the topic or not,the students’ composition text will produce certain alignment with the original text,including lexical and syntactic levels,and the alignment at the syntactic level is extremely significant.Finally,under different topic familiarity,there is a certain correlation between the linguistic performance(CAF)of students’ compositions and alignment,but the correlation will also vary according to different topic familiarity.In general,this study proves that topic familiarity of the input text is an important factor that affects the alignment effect in second language reading and writing,and also shows how topic familiarity affects the alignment effect.It is hoped that this study can provide some inspiration for the design of second language learning tasks,that is,teachers should reasonably arrange reading and writing,and select more familiar input materials for students to maximize the alignment,thus promoting second language acquisition.