An Experimental Study Of The Alignment Effect Of EDCM-Guided English Continuation Task

Alignment effect,error frequency of language use and writing proficiency are the core dimensions of continuation task and the hot topics of academic researches on the continuation task.Existing researches mainly focused on the selection of reading materials and the organization of continuation task to explore the effect of continuation task on promoting students’ writing proficiency.There are few studies on the continuation task based on the cognitive attributes of reading materials.This research attempts to explore the effect of EDCM-guided continuation task on university students’ English continuation task from the perspective of the event-domain cognitive model.The research questions include the following: 1.How does EDCM-guided English continuation task influence the lexis and phrase alignment? 2.Can EDCM-guided English continuation task reduce the error frequencies of university students’ English writing? 3.Can EDCM-guided English continuation task promote the university students’ writing proficiency?A total of 80 non-English major freshmen in two natural classes were chosen as research subjects,and a 10-week experiment of continuation task was conducted.One class was the experimental group,and the other class was the control group.The control group adopted the common method of the continuation task and implemented English writing teaching.The experimental group implemented English writing teaching according to the teaching plan of EDCM-guided continuation task.The subjects received a pre-test and a post-test before and after the experiment,the purpose of which was to test whether there was a significant difference in the English writing proficiency of the subjects before and after the experiment.At the end of the experiment,the differences in alignment effect between the experimental group and the control group were analyzed with Antconc 4.0.3.The Juku pigai was applied to examine the differences in the error frequencies of the experimental group and the control group in number agreement,tense,articles,etc.Finally,SPSS 26.0 was used to analyze the above data statistically.The research results show that the alignment effect of the continuation task in the experimental group is significantly higher than that in the control group;there are significant differences in the error frequencies of articles,copulas,non-finite verbs and Chinglish between the experimental group and the control group,but there are no significant differences in the error frequencies of number agreement and tense;the writing results of the experimental group in the post-test show that the writing proficiency of the experimental group is significantly higher than that of the control group.It can be seen that EDCM-guided English continuation task can effectively promote university students’ English writing proficiency of the continuation task.This research may have the following implications for continuation task teaching.In continuation task teaching,the teachers can use EDCM-guided English continuation task to guide the students to focus on the connections between events to understand the pre-reading material thoroughly and deeply.It can produce the close integration of comprehension and production to intensify the alignment effect of the continuation task and unleash its potential to promoting learning.