Effects Of Comparative Continuation On EFL Writing

Comparative continuation is one of the nine continuation tasks proposed by Professor Wang Chuming(2016)that can facilitate second language(L2)writing.It overcomes shortcomings of other continuation tasks that are considered unsuitable for argumentative writing training.In this task,learners are provided with a full text and required to read this complete text,then write a new composition by comparing with the original one,during which learners tend to interact with the reading text and notice the discourse structure and language expressions in the text,and imitate them in their following writing.Such alignment with the reading text can effectively improve L2 writing proficiency.At present,only two empirical studies have examined the effect of comparative continuation on L2 learning.The researchers have found that comparative continuation can produce alignment effect in terms of words and phrases,but it does not effectively improve form-based errors.Wang Chuming(2018)believed that students' inadequate interaction with the reading text and their insufficient understanding of the text will result in weakening of alignment effect.Therefore,strengthening learners' interaction with the text in comparative continuation tasks is the key to enhance alignment effect.However,there is no related research on whether strengthening interaction with the reading text in comparative continuation tasks will affect learners' allocation of attentional resources and whether it will improve learners' attention and thus produce more alignment effect.In addition,whether comparative continuation tasks can effectively improve L2 writing performance,as well as facilitate alignment at lexical and syntactical level remains to be discussed.The experiment in current study spread over six weeks.It adopted within-subject design.Sixty-two third-year students at a key high school participated in this study and they were randomly divided into three groups.Three groups were asked to respectively do propositional writing(PW),the ordinary comparative continuation(OCC)and the comparative continuation with sentence filling(CCSF)once a week.Latin-Square design was used to distribute experimental materials.A follow-up questionnaire was then conducted.After the experiment,all compositions were collected and typed into computer to yield three corpora.The evaluation on writing complexity,accuracy and fluency was conducted with L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA).The alignment effect at lexical level was conducted with Frequency List of AntConc 3.4.3,and the alignment effect at snyactical level was analyzed by counting target syntactic structures manually.Questionnaire was used to investigate students' attitude toward comparative continuation tasks and their allocation of attentional resources.Results showed that both OCC and CCSF can effectively improve written accuracy and fluency with the same effect,because both tasks can stimulate students' interaction with reading text,thus arouse students' attention to the text and facilitate alignment effect.However,both tasks had an unsatisfactory effect on improving written accuracy and alignment in terms of new words,because the input in comparative continuation tasks was implicit,which posed a limited effect on promoting some L2 grammars and vocabulary learning.Compared with CCSF,OCC facilitated the alignment of complex syntactic structures better,generating more gains on syntactic complexity,and produced more aligned content words and new words.More interaction in CCSF,though improved attention,can't facilitate more alignment.This is because strengthening students' interaction with the reading text will promote the alignment with the situation model in preceding text.By doing do,students who have poor critical thinking skills will spare a lot of attentional resources to eliminate the interference of the situation model in the preceding text,and to construct their own situation model at the same time,thus reducing attentional resources available to align with linguistic forms in the preceding text,which impacts written complexity and lexical alignment.The present study aims to compare the effect of PW,OCC and CCSF on L2 written performance with regard to linguistic features of complexity,accuracy,and fluency(CAF),analyze the allocation of attentional resources in OCC and CCSF,investigate how strengthening students' interaction with the reading text can affect the allocation of attentional resources and therefore influence alignment effect.This study helps understand the relationship among interaction,attention and alignment,and provides guidance on improving comparative continuation task.