| The continuation task,in which learners complete a story in L2 with its ending removed,was proposed by Professor Wang Churning.Combining comprehension with production,this task has aroused extensive interest of L2 resesarchers in recent years and has been proved to be beneficial to second language acquisition.By promoting the interaction between comprehension and production,alignment effect is triggered,and how to strengthen the alignment effect becomes a research focus.Influencing factors on alignment in the continuation task include the interest-level of the input text,task instructions,learners’ consciousness,input text genres,language complexity of the input text and so on.However,little research has been conducted to explore the mediating role of language proficiency.Some studies have investigated the effects of L2 proficiency on participants’ alignment with the input text in terms of degree of alignment and the manifestation of the structural alignment.However,the focus was mostly on linguistic alignment.The current study attempts to investigate the degree of English majors’alignment with the input text at both the linguistic and situational levels in order to deepen the understanding of alignment strength.Besides,the study also takes language proficiency into consideration to see whether the degree of alignment in high achievers’ continuations is different from that by underachievers.The current study aims to address the following two questions:1)Do English majors show linguistic alignment when writing follows text reading in a continuation task?If yes,are there differences between high achievers and underachievers as regards the linguistic alignment?2)Do English majors show content alignment when writing follows text reading in a continuation task?If yes,are there differences between high achievers and underachievers as regards the content alignment?Ninety-six third-year English majors from a comprehensive university in Jiangsu Province participated in this study.They were from three intact classes with different English proficiency levels and were ranked from high to low according to their TEM-4 scores.The first 33%of these students were grouped as high achievers and the last 33%as underachievers.The current study has yielded three findings:1)There is a significant positive relationship between the subjects’ language proficiency and lexical alignment strength and phrasal alignment strength showed in continuation.However,there is no significant relationship between subjects’ language proficiency and clausal alignment strength.2)The lexical alignment strength and phrasal alignment strength of high achievers are significantly stronger than those of underachievers in continuation.However,no significant difference is found between high achievers and underachievers in terms of the clausal alignment strength.3)Alignment was also detected in content as the subjects scored higher in their continuations in the five aspects in situation models.High achievers showed stronger alignment at the situational level.To be specific,they scored significantly higher in intentionality and reference to main individuals.These findings further confirm that alignment effect does exist in the continuation task completed by English majors and can occur at both linguistic and content levels.EFL learners’ language proficiency should be taken into consideration during the daily teaching of the English continuation task. |
