A Study On Alignment Effect In The Collaborative Continuation Task Of Senior High English Learners

The continuation task and collaborative writing have been two important research directions in the domain of second language writing,both of them focus on the impact of interaction on second language learning and output.Among them,the former emphasizes that the alignment effect generated by human-text interaction can promote language output,and the latter examines the effect of interpersonal interaction on written second language output.Empirical studies have confirmed the effect of the continuation task and collaborative writing on promoting learning respectively,but there are few studies on whether the combination of them can effectively strengthen the alignment effect in continuation tasks and promote language production.Based on that,the present study set out to fill this gap by constructing a collaborative continuation task which combines human-text interaction and interpersonal interaction so as to investigate its alignment effect.In this study,a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is adopted,with continuation conditions as its independent variable,and alignment effect as the dependent variable.45 senior high school students with the same level of English proficiency participate in the research.They are randomly assigned to two groups.Among them,30 students in the collaborative continuation group conducted the task in pairs and 15 students in the individual continuation group performed the task independently.The alignment effect in written texts is analyzed from three aspects:linguistic features,error frequencies and writing performance,the qualitative result of interview is used as supplementary for analyzing the quantitative data.The experimental results suggest that: Firstly,senior high English learners’ writings produced alignment effect with the source text in the collaborative continuation task.The alignment effect in the collaborative continuation task came from the close integration of comprehension and output.The combination of interpersonal and human-text interaction reinforced the coherent coordination of input and output,created communicative needs,motivated learners to deeply comprehend the communicative intentions of the author,and therefore triggered interactive alignment with the source text.Secondly,generally speaking,with regard to linguistic features,error frequencies and writing performance,the alignment effect in the collaborative continuation task promoted learners’ writing.Specifically,in terms of linguistic features,the alignment effect in collaborative continuations increased the frequencies of words,phrases and sentence patterns in continuations with the source text;As for error frequencies,the alignment effect in collaborative continuations significantly reduced form-based errors in continuations;In the matter of writing performance,the alignment effect in collaborative continuations has significantly improved the complexity and accuracy of language.Thirdly,the degree of alignment was higher in collaborative continuations compared with individual continuations.Based on the results above,the present study verifies that alignment effect exists in the collaborative continuation task.It further proves the learning-enhancing effects of the collaborative continuation task on senior high school students’ linguistic output in English writing.Despite some limitations,the present study may enrich related research in Chinese EFL context and enhance the understanding of the collaborative continuation task.It also offers some pedagogical implications on how to make advantage of the opportunities of language learning afforded by the collaborative writing task or other collaborative tasks.