A Study Of Alignment In The Interactive Dialogues In Chinese EFL Classroom

Recently,researches and studies at home and abroad have proved that alignment situation is an objective reality in the process of both L1 and L2 communication.Psycholinguistic researchers suggest that alignment serve as the basis of successful communication,namely,interlocutors align their vocabulary,sentence structures,situation models etc.,so as to make their psychological representations integrated.Also,SLA researchers find that the endeavor to reach alignment is acquiring.A learner adjusts his linguistic output accordingly in order to get adapted to the current situations when communicating,which is a process of learning.Built upon Interactive–Alignment Model,this research attempts to make empirical investigations into the classroom interactive discourse.Two EFL classes have been observed so as to explore the alignment and misalignment naturally occurring in Chinese EFL classroom.The first aim is to work out the manifestation and specific distribution of various alignment situations.Meanwhile,typical dialogues consisting of both misalignment and linguistic or pragmatic errors are also examined.Researches have been made to explore the correlation between misalignment and errors within dialogues.It is perceived that linguistic alignment is pervasive in the process of EFL classroom interaction.Alignment is naturally reached at different linguistic levels.Lexical alignment and collocation alignment are the two types that arise most frequently from EFL dialogues.Moreover,alignment at one level is highly likely to boost alignment at another one.Getting aligned with an advantaged speaker is of great benefit to language acquisition because it facilitates internalizing the correct usage of EFL.As a result,the ongoing communication is pushed forward,while misalignment also takes place occasionally.When an EFL learner is affected by his L1 habits and neglects the correct output presented previously,he takes more risks of producing incorrect expressions.Furthermore,investigation has been made to examine the cognitive mechanism of interactive alignment and its specific functions.Results show that the forming and operating of alignment mechanism is a natural and swift process.Three critical variables contribute much to processing interlanguage and producing aligned output,that is,paradigm of output,psychological-physiological function,and preliminary command of target language.Specifically speaking,the achievement of alignment greatly results in alleviating cognitive stress,saving communicative time and energy,and attracting more individual listeners to join the dialogue.This research is meaningful to EFL teaching and learning.It is of great magnitude to build a desirable environment for reaching interactive alignment.In addition,it is also necessary for language teachers to stimulate students' drive to communicate and provide effective feedback so as to eliminate those errors arising from misalignment.