Alignment In Chinese College EFL Learners' Performance In A Monologue Task

This study investigates alignment in Chinese college EFL(English as a foreign language)learners' performance in a monologue task and the influence of participants'language proficiency on alignment between the given story and their monologues.This study utilizes the recording transcripts of 60 participants from SWECCL 2.0(Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners).These participants,who were all sophomores in English major,took Chinese TEM4 Oral Test in 2006.There are three tasks in this test.They were required to talk on a given topic,in other words,give a monologue in Task 2,before which they heard a story with a related topic in Task 1.Quantitative and qualitative analyses of participants' monologues and the given story yielded the following major findings:First,alignment exists between the given story and participants' monologues at the lexical and syntactic level.Participants aligned the words the given story,including those of lower frequencies in daily use.In terms of syntactic structures,alignment exists between the given story and participants' monologues only when participants can comprehend the structures.When participants tried to apply the sentence structure which they heard in the given story to their monologues,they showed their preference to the words that they were familiar with or other sentence structures with similar meanings.Second,though alignment can be found between the given story and the monologues of participants of higher proficiency and those of lower proficiency in the lexical and syntactic level,the former tended to align the given story in a more flexible and creative way.This study has both theoretical and pedagogical implications.Theoretically,it enhances our understanding of how alignment impacts on participants' own decisions about what to talk,specifically their word choice and use of sentence structures.Pedagogically,it offers empirical evidence for teachers to realize the importance of alignment in English learning and integrating it into classroom teaching.