On Alignment Effect Of Language Input And Output In Written Retelling Tasks

Alignment is a process in which both interlocutors inordinate and adapt with each other by interaction,which mainly manifests at the level of situation and linguistics.Researchers have conducted alignment studies from different perspectives.From the perspective of psycho-linguistics,alignment effect is taken as the basis of successful interpersonal communication in which interlocutors construct mental representations through aligning at two main levels.From the perspective of sociocognitive,L2 researchers hold that language learning is a kind of alignment.Learners transfer language experience into mental representations by aligning with surrounding environments for learning.In spite of various research perspectives,most of researchers recognize that alignment plays an important role on language development.Currently,the vast majority of alignment researches put focus on dialogue,while there are few studies related to other language forms.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore the alignment effect of retelling tasks in second language acquisition by taking previous researches from the perspective of sociocognitive as references.The present research invited 76 freshmen of non-English major from two parallel classes of a university of Guangxi province.Participants were required to finish written retelling task after reading an input article.The independent variable was language input.Participants in Class A read the Chinese version,while those in Class B read the English version.Three research questions are as followed:1)How do Chinese input and English input respectively affect the linguistic alignment effect in the target language output?2)How do Chinese input and English input respectively affect the situation alignment effect in the target language output?3)How do the two versions of language input affect learners'written output concerning linguistic error frequency?The result showed that there was alignment effect in retelling tasks,but language input played an important role on it.Participants who read the English version aligned more with the original article in terms of word and structure choices in written retelling tasks;they preferred to use achievement strategy to align at the situation level.Moreover,the error frequency made by them was lower than those who read the Chinese version.At last,some implications on second language acquisition and suggestions for further study were put forward so as to enrich researches on alignment effect which is constructional to L2 learning.