A Study On The Effect Of Alignment In Senior High School Students’ English Argumentative Writing

Over the past few years,researchers have found that language users are inclined to adapt to the language that have been encountered in first language(L1)dialogue and L1 writing.This phenomenon was named as alignment(Pickering & Garrod,2004).In second language acquisition research,Wang and Wang(2014)examined whether alignment occurs in second language(L2)writing via two narrative writingafter-reading tasks.As an extension of Wang and Wang’s(2014)research,the current study aims to explore whether there is alignment effect in the argumentative writingafter-reading task by senior high school students.A total of 40 students in grade 1 and grade 2 at a key senior high school in Jiangxi province participated in this study.20 of them were randomly chosen from grade one and another 20 students were randomly chosen from grade two.Before the study,they were required to take a comprehensive English test.Group 1 was the low score group(LSG),while Group 2 was the high score group(HSG)in order to make a comparison.Both of the two groups were required to finish the writing-after-reading task.The task was conducted during regular class time in the evening and lasted for55 minutes.Participants’ written production and the reading material were collected and typed into the computer to build up 3 small-size corpora for further comparing.A corpus analysis was adopted and the software Antconc3.2.4w was used to analyze the lexical alignment.The syntactic alignment(phrases and clauses)are calculated by the researchers.The error frequencies analysis was also adopted as another supplementary index to check the alignment effect in this research.The results showed that there were similarities between the input material and learners’ output at both lexical and syntactical level in the argumentative writingafter-reading task.At the lexical level,63% of frequently-used content words used in the given materials were used by learners in their writings;at syntactic level,the total mean frequencies of alignment in LSG and HSG were 5.84 per 100 words,and 3.45 per 100 words.Thus,we can conclude that there exists alignment in the argumentative writing-after-reading task.The results also indicate that the alignment effect was influenced by English proficiency.The alignment effect varied for HSGand LSG.The LSG have stronger alignment effect with the original text.At lexical level,LSG was more likely to use the words appeared in the input text;at the level of syntactic,LSG used more fully-aligned structures than high proficiency group.As for error categories,the error rate of LSG was lower than high score group in number agreement errors and tense errors.The error rate of LSG was much higher than high score group in Chinglish.The findings have some implications for language teaching and learning :Coupling production with comprehension give rise to alignment,which is beneficial to language teaching and learning.The writing-after-reading task was justified to be a reliable tool;teachers may employ this task with proper input reading material according to the senior high school students’ proficiency level in writing teaching.