Alignment Effect Of The Continuation Task Of The Argumentative Essay On Topic Supporting In EFL Learners’ Paragraphs

A continuation task proposed by Wang in 2012 provides learners with a text with its ending removed and requires them to complete it through writing in a most coherent and logical way.Wang in 2016 concluded that the continuation task combines language understanding and output and has a facilitating effect on language learning.Based on the Interactive Alignment Model proposed by Pickering and Garrod(2004)and the Rhetorical Structure Theory proposed by Mann and Thompson(1988),the current study attempts to explore the alignment effects of the continuation task of writing argumentative essays on discourse coherence.Especially,the focus of discourse coherence in the current study is on examining the alignment effects of the continuation task on the first topic supporting sentences in EFL learners’paragraphs.44 high school learners of English as a foreign language(EFL)in total were assigned to two groups on average with no significant difference in English writing proficiency,namely the experiment group and the control group.Each participant was required to complete one continuation task of writing a standardized 5-paragraph argumentative essay,with the topic "Educational programs should be their first choice when they are free".The only difference in the reading material(the original text)given to the experiment group and the control group is that participants in the experiment group were provided with the first paragraph with the thesis statement,the whole second paragraph with direct topic supporting and the third paragraph only with a topic sentence while the participants in the control group were only provided with the first paragraph,in order to explore the alignment effect of the continuation task of writing argumentative essays on the topic supporting in EFL learners’paragraphs.AntConc,RSTTool and SPSS were the statistical analysis tools and the research data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively.According to the research data,there are three conclusion as follows in this study.Firstly,there exist the alignment effects between the EFL learners’ writing and the reading material in the continuation task of writing argumentative essays,which occurs not only at the linguistic level,but also at the level of situation model,and will promote language learning to some extent.Secondly,although in the continuation task of argumentative essays the only difference between the experiment group and the control group is a second paragraph with direct supporting sentence,the results showed that the alignment effects at different levels have a significant impact on the use of direct topic supporting sentences in EFL learners’paragraphs.In other words,EFL learners tend to use more direct topic supporting because of the alignment effects.Thirdly,under the alignment effect of the direct topic supporting,EFL learners have a better command of English rhetoric relations to make their writing of argumentative essays more coherent and convincing.