Comparison Of Alignment Effect In The Continuation Tasks Of Narration And Argumentation

Interaction has unquestionable effect on foreign language learning.However,under the limitation of environment of foreign language teaching in China,learners have little chance to interact with native speakers,and in college foreign language classes,students have limited opportunities to interact with the teacher and classmates.This environment affect the efficiency and quality of foreign language learning,so it is emergent to find a more efficient way to interact for Chinese learners.As a new method,the human-text interaction,continuation task has aroused great interest among researchers.Deep research about the effect of continuation task on language acquisition,especially the alignment effect in continuation task have been made,and the results show that there does exist alignment in continuation task,and that the intensity of alignment effect is influenced by many variables.Most of the existing studies choose narration as reading materials,and the application of other genres to continuation task is rarely mentioned.The change of genres of reading materials bring not only the change of style,but also the change of context and the models to be imitated,so can it bring different interaction between learners and text? Are other genres besides narration suitable for continuation task? All the questions need to be further discussed to broaden the horizon of research about continuation task.This empirical study aims to investigate the differences in alignment and language error frequency produced in the continuation tasks of narration and argumentation.The subjects are two groups of English major freshmen,with 26 students in each group.During the 8-week teaching experiment,one group(Group A)finishes 8 continuation tasks of narration,and the other group(Group B)finishes 8 continuation tasks of argumentation.The analysis of the alignment amounts,error types and frequencies shows that the argumentation writing produces more alignment in vocabulary and collocations and fewer language errors than narration writing,while the narration writing produces more words than the argumentation writing.These results can help foreign language teachers and researchers understand better the continuation tasks of different genres in terms of their effects on language learning,alignment in particular.They also provide some enlightenment for the teaching and research of continuation tasks.