The Effect Of Comprehension-production Coupling On L2 Writing Coherence

The present study aims to investigate the effect of comprehension-production coupling on L2 development,particularly on writing coherence.Enlightened by Pickering and Garrod's(2013)claim that processes of comprehension and production are interwoven and by findings of research on the Continuation Task that this interweaving facilitates L2 development in terms of CAF,the present study asks whether coupling production with comprehension enhances coherence,another language feature besides CAF.Specifically,it endeavors(1)to examine whether comprehension-production coupling has a role to play in facilitating L2 writing coherence,and(2)to tease out factors parasitic on this coupling that mediate the facilitation.The issues above were approached via an empirical study wherein quantitative analyses,together with qualitative description,were carried out.A total of 174 EFL learners from three intact classes were randomly assigned to two experimental groups(performing a Continuation Task)and a control group(performing a free writing task).Operation differs among groups: The learners in one experimental group were required to judge 10 true-false items before continuing the incomplete story they read while the learners in the other experimental group completed the same incomplete story immediately after their reading.The learners in the control group,however,were asked to write a story on the same topic without being exposed to any reading material.The true-false test here served two purposes: measuring learners' comprehension of the story on the one hand and drawing learners' attention to specific information,thus intensifying their alignment with the story on the other.The data collected were analyzed by computational tools like Coh-Metrix and AntConc.Results showed that intimately coupling production with comprehension,as instantiated in the Continuation Task,could enhance L2 writing coherence in both language and content.Specifically,the learners in the experimental groups preferred to repeat the expressions previously encountered in their reading,adopt the linguistic forms detailed in information relevant to the situation depicted in the story,and keep their continuations consistent with the reading material in terms of grammatical knowledge.Moreover,this preference grew in accord with an increase of alignment intensity and comprehension accuracy.The present study has verified a theoretically motivated and empirically grounded way of facilitating L2 writing coherence,i.e.,to couple production with comprehension,and has identified factors that mediate this facilitation,i.e.,alignment intensity and comprehension accuracy.It suggests that coherence,a language feature once hard to evaluate and improve,could be enhanced via the Continuation Task,typical of the comprehension-production coupling,wherein learners develop ideas germane to the situation model that is constructed based on the text they read and contrive to cohere their writings with their reading,both in language and in content.