The Effect Of Text Genre On Alignment In Continuation Task

Alignment refers to the cognitive process of people's adaptation,dynamic coordination,and mutual adjustment in social reaction,which has a significant influence on the development of language.Research on alignment has been mainly studied by the following two aspects.Psycholinguists state that alignment effect is a mental representation built by the interaction through situation model,which communicators can achieve the purpose of communicating.While SLA researchers believe that alignment is a mental representation transformed from the experience of language to the ever-changing environment,which helps learners to achieve the purpose of learning.The alignment of language does not only exist in dialogue,Wang and Wang(2014)have proved that alignment also exists in the continuation task that has coupled the comprehension and production tightly.The main manifestation of alignment lies in the influence of input language on the output language's accuracy.The present study,with the theory of Interactive Alignment Model(IAM),from the socio-cognitive perspective,tries to examines whether the alignment exists in the continuation task and find out the manifestations and difference of alignment in narration and argumentation.The author has chosen two passages with their endings removed.Participants are required to read the passage and continue to write an ending to the passage.Two classes from Senior three students have joined this experiment.After the test,cooperate with another researcher,the present study has made three analysis with these collected data.First,calculate the words used in the participants' written productions as compared with the original passage;second,mark and classify the errors that all the participants make in their written productions;third,chose a random sample of each text genre,mark and classify the aligned collocation,sentences and structures.The results of this study show that the alignment effect does exist in the continuation task,but it is manifested much stronger in the written productions of narration than that in the argumentation.And the differences between them are mainly manifested in the following aspects: 1)the errors of written productions after reading narration are less than the errors of written productions after reading argumentation,and 2)the alignment effect in continuing narration is stronger than the continuation of argumentation,for the numbers of aligned collocations,structures and verbatim sentences in the productions of narration are higher than those in the productions of argumentation.