Effects Of Text Type On Reading-to-writing Alignment Among Senior High School Students

Alignment is the complex means by which human beings effect coordinated interaction,and maintain that interaction in dynamically adaptive ways.The adaptiveness characterizing the ongoing alignment of the human organism to its changing environment is simply learning by another name.Learning are trajectories of ecological experience and repertoires of participation gained in the process of adaptive dynamics.Effective learning relies on the interaction between the learners and the learning environment.L2 development is obviously among kinds of learning with its own traits.Nevertheless,L2 learning shares the features with other forms of dynamic adaptivity/learning.Consequently,effective language learning rests upon the interaction and alignment between the learners and the target language.As Pickering and Garrod(2004)have shown that production coupled with comprehension can reinforce and strengthen the effect of alignment,writing after reading tasks are prevailing for integrating the receptive skill(reading)with the productive skill(writing).When completing the tasks,learners need to comprehend the reading materials for the sake of producing logical and cohesive writing results,which furtherly promotes effective language learning.It is noteworthy that this kind of task has been adopted to assess students' language ability in the reformation of the college entrance examination.Studies focusing on factors affecting alignment and measures to enhance alignment in reading-to-writing tasks are getting growing attention.Previous researches have revealed that the input language(English vs.Chinese)can affect alignment.Specifically,English texts align Chinese leaners better than Chinese texts with lower error frequency and higher word keyness.Based on the preceding researches,this paper has come up with three questions:(1)Does L2 learmers,writings show alignment with different texts types in reading-to-writing tasks?(2)How do different texts affect alignment in reading-to-writing tasks with regard to error frequency and word keyness?(3)How does the increase of text type knowledge affect alignment in reading-to-writing tasks?Accordingly,a research,which consisted of 3 studies,was designed to look into the questions.In study 1,48 students from two classes with no significant differences in their overall language ability or writing ability were included in the experiment.The experimental group was informed with knowledge about text types through daily classes while the controlled group was not.In study 2,both of EG and CG were required to perform reading-to-writing tasks with narrative and argumentation reading materials.Their writings were collected and transcribed for further analysis.In study 3,interviews with 8 students and 4 teachers were carried out to know their opinions about the reformed examination and their ideas about writing after different text types,with the purpose of making complementary explanation for the results.The study addresses that writing after reading narrative stories aligns students better than argumentation.Furthermore,students' knowledge of text types can enhance alignment when completing the tasks.Finally,interviews among students and teachers show that they are both confident and concerned about the reformation.On one hand,reading-to-writing tasks facilitate students in activating corresponding situation models and linguistic representations which are fundamental to achieve better alignment.On the other hand,while the reading-to-writing tasks are employed as test items,the evaluation system targeted at reading-to-writing tasks has not been set up yet without which teachers find it hard to develop effective training or instructional programs.In the light of the findings,two proposals are put forward by this paper.Fore and foremost,it is highly suggested that when applying reading-to-writing tasks in a large-scale assessment,narrative reading materials should be given priority to.In addition,learners should be informed of the text type knowledge in line with the tasks they have come across with the purpose to raise their genre awareness for better alignment and effective language comprehension and production.This study is achieved in answering the research questions,howbeit,it can be improved through keeping a similar writing topic for different text types to ensure the validity and accuracy of the study.Further studies are expected to discuss the effect of alignment in various reading-to-writing tasks and figure out feasible methods to better alignment.