Effect Of Reading Detective And Emotional Stories On Senior High School Students' English Language Alignment In Story Continuation Tasks

This research is to explore whether and in what way the genre of the stories as input material affects EFL learners' written production.Two main research questions are addressed as follows.1)Whether the second language(L2)written production of learners who read detective stories aligns more and better with the original stories than that of learners who read emotional stories in story continuation tasks? 2)Whether reading detective stories has a better effect on the accuracy,fluency,and complexity of leaners' L2 written production than reading emotional stories in story continuation tasks? The theoretical framework of the research consists of the input and output hypothesis and the interactive alignment model.The experiment spread over two weeks,in which participants were asked to complete two story continuation tasks during regular class time(40 minutes).Seventy-six high school students from Grade 12 of High School Attached to Shanghai Normal University were required to write an at-least-150-word ending in 40 minutes after reading a detective story and an emotional story with their endings removed respectively.Only one week intervened between the administrations of the two tasks and the order of the administrations of tasks were taken into account.SPSS was used to analyze the interestingness of the story,to examine whether the interestingness was controlled,and to test if there was significant difference between the data of the syntactic complexity,linguistic accuracy,and fluency(CAF)of the text collected in two tasks,so as to ensure the effectiveness of the research and the results.The study with 50 participants' paired compositions showed that there was no significant difference in the CAF of the language production between the students who wrote after reading the emotional story and those who wrote after reading the detective story in the continuation task according to the paired samples test.Furthermore,the study found the positive effects of detective stories on EFL leaners' language alignment on the level of words.It is suggested that teachers can choose relatively more detective stories as input text for story continuation tasks to strengthen the alignment effect on the lexical level.Story continuation task is very likely to be a new formula in EFL reading and writing classrooms with current trend of English language teaching reform in China.