The Effect Of Task Instructions On L2Writing From The Perspective Of Alignment

Most research over the past few years has proved that alignment takes place inL1dialogue and L1writing, that is to say, language users are inclined to adapt to thelanguage which have been encountered. However, few studies have focused onalignment research in L2learning. Wang and Wang’s research (2012) is one amongthe few studies intended to investigate the alignment effects on L2writing. Via twostory continuation tasks, they probed into alignment in L2writing at the discourselevel grounded in the interactive alignment model. Their research showed thatreading a story exerted an alignment effect on the learners’ subsequent writings. Thatis, the learners tended to align with the language of the preceding story and were lesslikely to make errors in their writings.As an extension of Wang and Wang’s research, the current paper aims toidentify a variable that may promote stronger alignment in the story continuationtask. Specifically, the role of task instructions was examined.52junior Englishmajors in a university in Guangzhou participated in this research, with26in eachgroup. The treatment group continued a story following the explicit task instructionwhich required them to imitate as many language expressions of the original text aspossible in their writing and the control group followed the implicit task instructiononly asking them to continue the story. Immediately after their writing, allparticipants were required to do a questionnaire. To investigate the role of taskinstructions in L2writing in terms of alignment, this dissertation made amultidimensional analysis, including linguistic similarity at three levels and errorrates. And the questionnaire was used to help account for the findings.The results confirm the research hypothesis that the explicit task instructionenhances alignment in L2writing. That is, the learners following the explicit taskinstruction were more apt to produce the words, phrases and sentence structures ofthe provided text than those following the implicit task instruction. Furthermore, the explicit task instruction incurred fewer errors in the learners’ writings. Moreover, thestudy suggests that the learners of different L2proficiency levels were not equallyaffected by the two task instructions. That is, the poor learners were more susceptibleto the effect of task instructions than the good learners. The data analysis of thequestionnaire provides an account for the results mentioned above. Finally the paperdiscusses the implications for alignment research as well as L2pedagogy and thesuggestions for further research.