An Experimental Study On Effect Of Peer Interactive Revision Upon Alignment

The continuation task is advocated by Professor Wang Chuming(2012)as a valid tool to facilitate L2 learning,in which students need to complete a story with its middle or ending removed.It is indicated that learners conducting the continuation task are involved in learner-text interaction,which lead to alignment with the preceding text and facilitate L2 learning.To further facilitate alignment,Wang(2012)proposes a hypothesis that “the stronger the interaction is,the better the alignment can be” which means the intensity of alignment hinges on interactions.What's more,in consideration of the continuation task has been applied as a new kind of writing task in college entrance exam in Zhejiang province in 2016,and thus far,no empirical studies have been reported to examine Wang's hypothesis in a continuation task towards high school students.In this case,the present study endeavors to probe into the continuation task too see whether the magnitude of interaction can affects alignment,by incorporating a learner-learner interaction(namely,peer interaction revision)into the original learner-text interaction in a high school continuation task.In addition,the study focus on finding out reasons contributing to the variation of alignment.To answer the research questions,an experimental study was carried out with 36 senior high participants categorized as control group and experimental group,and the18 participants in experimental group were further paired into 9 groups.All of the 36 participants were first required to finish a continuation task within 50 minutes.After that,participants in experimental group were arranged to conduct a peer interactive revision in pairs,while participants in control group were asked to conduct an independent revision.Besides,participants in experimental group were asked to conduct an interview in pairs.The data collected for analysis including participants' first and second continuations,and transcribed of interview recordings.Results of the study indicated that peer interactive revision facilitated alignment in a senior high continuation task,regarding to the significant improvement of alignedkeywords,phrases and sentence structure in the revised version compared to the preceding text.Thus,this result gleaned evidence to support Wang's hypothesis that stronger interactions exert a positive influence on alignment in a continuation task.And transcribed of participants' interview recordings revealed that reasons contributing to the enhanced alignment were reconstruction,passage saliency application,and language modification.The research results were in consistent with the IAM(Pickering and Garrod,2004),which indicates that development of representations at situation levels triggering alignment at linguistic level,and vice verse.Overall,this study provided empirical evidence for Wang's hypothesis in high school continuation task.It proved that learner-text interaction coupled with learner-learner interaction lead to a significant improvement on alignment.This was achieved by participants helping each other reconstructing,applying passage saliency of the preceding story and modifying language use of the writing.The findings deserves special consideration in L2 teaching and learning.L2 learners should be provided with increasing number and different dimensions of interaction,since interaction on situational level activates rich and accurate language use in linguistic level.