Effects Of Emotions On The Language Alignment And Writing Quality In The Continuation Writing

Learner’s emotion as a major factor affecting foreign language learning relates greatly to the foreign language learning effects.And they two are connected,influenced and having the relation of cause-and-effect.In detail,positive emotion activates learners’ foreign language aptitudes,unleashes their potentials,and enhances foreign language learning effects.Conversely,negative emotion narrows learners’ array of thoughts and inhibits language cognitive processes.In other words,positive language learning effects promote the development of positive emotions,while negative foreign language learning effects lead to the accumulation of negative emotions,thus forming a vicious circle between emotions and foreign language learning.Wang Chuming is the first scholar who emphasizes that learner’s emotion plays an important role in language alignment.In the continuation task,the more positive the emotions of L2 learners,the easier it is for them to obtain emotional identification or language alignment from teachers or reading materials.Therefore,this study combines the emotions with the continuation task study,which attempts to probe into the effects of emotions on language learning,i.e.whether L2 learners in different emotional states would affect their language alignment and writing quality in the continuation writing task.This study recruits 156 non-English majors freshmen from a university in Hebei Province as research subjects.First,they are required to discuss about the given reading material within the same length of time after respectively watching the positive emotionally evocative film clips(group A)and negative emotion evocative film clips(group B).Control group does not have any forms of emotional evocation(group C).Lastly,all these subjects are asked to write a continuation of one story with its ending removed during the identical time.After the experiment,15 subjects in total from 3 emotion groups are randomly selected for the interview to learn about their subjective feelings after their watching the emotionally evocative films clips and attitudes and feelings in the experiment.The results show that positive emotion can facilitate the interaction output,language alignment and writing quality.In detail,the interaction quantity and quality of group A is better than that of group C.And there is significant difference between group A and group C in terms of the number of language alignment and the continuation writing scores.By contrast,the group interaction effects,the number of language alignment and the writing scores of group B is lower than that of group C,but statistical results do not show any significant differences between these two groups.Overall,this study provides the empirical evidence for Wang’s idea,that is,the “emotions influencing the alignment effects” in the continuation writing.It shows that emotions are likely to be a factor of influencing language alignment,and further provides some relevant enlightenment and inspirations for future continuation task researches.