Ent In The English Written Production Of Chinese EFL Learners Of Different English Proficiency

Alignment has been the research focus in the fields of psycholinguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) over the past two decades. Psycholinguists maintain that underneath the successful communication lies the interlocutors’mutual alignment at the levels of lexical items, structures, and situation models in their oral production. For sociocognitive SLA researchers, alignment itself is deemed to be the learning process in the sense that it is by the alignment with the ever-changing environment that learners turn their linguistic experience into mental representation. Although these researchers look into alignment from different perspectives, all of them consider alignment as a key link in peoples’ language development. Researches, however, have discussed alignment only under the setting of dialogue so far. In other words, the previous findings on alignment can simply verify that alignment does exist in people’s oral production. To bridge the gap, the present research, from the sociocognitive perspective, makes an attempt to explore whether alignment occurs in written production, with the guidance of Interactive Alignment Model. The present research, which applies the research design in Wang and Wang’s (2014) study on alignment, requires Chinese EFL learners to perform two tasks (i.e., the writing-after-reading task and the topic writing task) in order to find out more evidence to support the argument that alignment can also occur in L2written production and further to figure out the different effect of alignment/self-alignment on learners’ L2writings. In fact, the present research differs from Wang and Wang’s (2014) in terms of the research scope and analytical mechanisms, and it also takes L2proficiency into consideration with the purpose of investigating into alignment in a more detailed way.The present research has found that alignment/self-alignment do occur in L2written production, and their effect on L2written production are closely related to the languages of the reading materials, learners’ L2proficiency and task types. The findings of this research have pedagogical implications.