An Empirical Study Of Linguistic Alignment In The Continuation Task In Senior High School Students

The continuation task(CT)was applied as a new type of writing task in the National College Entrance Examination(NCEE)in Zhejiang Province first time in2016,and it has become the primary writing task in NCEE.Through asymmetry between learners’ comprehension and production abilities,CT closely integrates the two to promote alignment.Although the alignment effect in CT has been studied mostly among college students,this dissertation tries to explore the linguistic alignment in CT in senior high school students.The research questions are as follows.(1)What is the degree of linguistic alignment of the senior high students in CT?What are the differences between the three groups on linguistic alignment?(2)What are the main language errors of the senior high students in CT? What are the differences between the three groups on language errors?Based on the interactive alignment theory,the extension hypothesis,and input and output hypotheses,this study uses text analysis and interview to collect a total of 126 CT writing from three parallel classes of monthly examinations and a self-constructed corpus with the help of Ant Conc 3.5.9 and SPSS 25 to analyze the related data.The aim is to explore the differences in linguistic alignment and frequency of language errors in CT among senior high school students with different English writing proficiency.The author also conducted interviews with a sample of students with different writing proficiency and teachers to supplement the findings of the study.The study found that there was a strong alignment between the three groups of students with different writing proficiency at both the lexical and syntactic levels.The lower group(LG)had the highest degree of lexical alignment because they tended to use more same words in the given text,while the upper group(UG)had the highest syntactic alignment in that they focused more on the syntactic structures in given text and used these structures in their writings.Second,the most common language errors committed by students were tense errors and Chinglish.In general,the frequency of language errors was higher in LG than in the middle group(MG)and UG,but the frequency of errors in the use of articles and non-finite verbs was lower in LG because the LG students tended to use the same words in given text as an avoidance strategy.Besides,it was noteworthy that MG students used Chinglish most frequently.Based on the above results,suggestions for students with different writing proficiency are put forward to improve their continuation ability.UG students should check the use of non-finite verbs and articles and improve word accuracy.MG students should refrain from word-by-word translation while improving their paraphrasing ability to increase the frequency of partial alignment.By modifying words’ parts of speech and utilizing paraphrase,LG students can increase the diversity of words and grammatical structures while also bolstering the subject-verb agreement and tense consistency.Additionally,this study also offered several suggestions for teachers’ CT teaching: improve students’ linguistic alignment ability;increase the diversity of words and grammatical structures;help students to build their own corpus.