The Effect Of Alignment On L2Writing Accuracy

To help second language (L2) learners develop accuracy in L2writing, a common practice used by L2teachers is to offer corrective feedback (CF). Although numerous empirical studies have been conducted thus far, the efficacy of CF is still a vexing question. Wang (2011) proposes an alternative way to solve the problem of how to help L2learners become more able writers from the align-to-learn perspective. Existing research on alignment mainly pivots on its facilitative role in interpersonal communication. Wang&Wang (2012) start the study of alignment in L2writing and confirm that it can facilitate L2writing as well as L2speaking. In the hope of delving deeper into the potential role of alignment in improving L2writing accuracy, this study employed an English story continuation task to elicit the writing performance of participants. Specifically, this research focuses on two questions:1) whether alignment occurs in an L2continuation task after reading an incomplete story in L2,2) whether L2learners make fewer errors in the L2continuation task in the presence of a text as compared with the absence of a text.For this purpose, an empirical study was conducted by means of a story continuation task, which was operationalized as the presence and absence of the preceding story. Participants were49freshman English majors from two parallel classes, with26in one class and23in the other. Before the study, an English proficiency test was administered to ensure that participants were at the same proficiency level. And the two classes were asked to continue an incomplete story within70minutes,20minutes for reading and50minutes for writing. Class1continued the story with the provided text present, while class2did the continuation in the absence of the text. After the writing, two students from each class were randomly selected to partake in a retrospective interview for a close inspection of their composing process.Results show that in the story continuation task, where writing was tightly coupled with reading comprehension, alignment with the provided text occurred in both classes, which was demonstrated by the linguistic similarity between participants’continuations and the preceding story at three levels:lexical, phrasal and sentential. However, the magnitude of alignment was different for the two classes, with class1wrote under an apparently stronger alignment influence. Additionally, the two classes also differed in their writing accuracy. Errors in participants’writings were categorized according to the schema of error classification proposed by James (2001) and divided into4categories. Overall, class1made significantly fewer errors than class2. And when the four error categories were examined separately, the same pattern held. There was another unexpected discovery in this study that the average length of class1’s writings was171words longer than that of class2. So participants performing the task with the original text present showed an obvious edge with respect to writing accuracy and fluency. Two Pearson correlation tests further unveil that participants’writing performance was significantly correlated with their alignment magnitude with the text. With all else being equal, participants who wrote under a stronger alignment effect tended to write more accurately and fluently.The findings of this study suggest that alignment is conducive to improving L2writing accuracy. Additionally, the story continuation task is a useful educational tool that L2teachers can employ to develop L2learners’writing accuracy.