| Recent years,continuation task has aroused wide interest in the second language acquisition research.Professor Wang illustrated the interactive alignment theory as the theoretical background of continuation task,proved the facilitating effect of continuation task on second language writing with a series of empirical studies,revealed the mechanism that explains why it has facilitating effect.Since then,more researches embarked on the exploration of the facilitating effect of continuation task in different aspects of language acquisition,especially in writing.Among them,the research about the effect of continuation task on syntactic complexity is still limited.In view of the situation,this paper aims to investigate the effects of the alignment entailed in the continuation task on syntactic complexity in high school students' L2 written production.As for the participants,in one of the key high school in Jiangxi Province,two parallel classes,a total of 78 students,in senior one grade are selected as subjects who are randomly assigned as experiment group,with 38 students,and control group,with 40 students;the experiment group is implementing the continuation writing task while the other is receiving traditional writing task.The main experiment design is conducting seven writing treatments including pre-test and post-test.All the writing samples from these treatments are collected and transcribed into text files in order to be analyzed by the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(Lu,2010)for the syntactic writing complexity.The analyzing outcomes include the demonstration of eleven indices provided by L2 SCA,an advanced computational tool.All these indices have been divided into five types: 1)the length of the production;2)the sentence complexity;3)the subordination;4)the coordination and 5)the particular structures.This thesis aims to investigate three research questions:1)What is the current level of the syntactic complexity in senior one students' writing?2)Does the training of continuation task exert any effects on the performance of syntactic complexity among the high school students? If so,in what aspects?3)Does the training of the continuation task increase students' interest in writing compared to traditional writing task?The research results show that 1)the current development of students' syntactic complexity is underdeveloped and unbalanced,especially in the coordination and subordination indices.2)by comparing the pre-test and post-test,students in EG group made progress in 8 out of 11 indices and the progress is significant in the number of verb phrases per T-unit(VP/T,P=0.05)and by comparing the post-tests of the EG and CG,there is a significant difference in the indices,like the mean length of clause(MLC,P=0.00),the number of clauses in per sentence(C/S,P=0.00),the number of clauses in per T-unit(C/T,P=0.015),the number of T-units per sentence(T/S,P=0,001).3)the application of the continuation task can significantly increase students' interest and boost their confidence in using more complex structures.The implications from the results are worth to be noticed.1)in terms of the unbalanced development of different dimensions in syntactic complexity system,teachers should encourage the use of coordination and subordination structures.2)the continuation task can be applied in the writing training for the purpose of improving the efficiency of developing students' syntactic complexity.3)the continuation task can also be employed in the writing class to stimulate students' writing interest and boost their writing confidence.The limitation of the thesis lies in failing to achieve the desirable alignment effect on all the indices of the syntactic complexity and to test the long-term effect of the continuation task.The suggestions for future study is to perfect the experiment design to reinforce the alignment effect;at the same time,a longer period of experiment time should be ensured for capturing the change of the syntactic complexity. |
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