A Study On The Influence Of Topic Familiarity In Continuation Task For Senior High School Students

Writing,viewed as an expressive skill,reflects learners’ comprehensive competence in language using,which has been the spotlight to English teachers for a long time.As a new type of writing in recent English College Entrance Examinations,the continuation task accounts for 25 points in the writing section with 40 points in total,occupying a relatively large proportion.However,students’ language performance in this part is far from expectation and falls behind the requirements in English Curriculum Standards for General High School.From the requirements of the continuation task,it can be seen that the given reading material is the foundation for linguistic imitation and content creation.In the underling affecting factors of reading material,it is the topic familiarity that influences alignment in the continuation task.Based on the theories of input hypothesis,output hypothesis and alignment effect,this study takes 52 senior two students in a class from a certain high school in Zhangzhou City,Fujian Province as research objects,aiming to explore the influence of topic familiarity on the continuation task for high school students.It includes the following two questions:(1)What influences does the topic familiarity have on linguistic alignment in the continuation task for high school students?(2)What influences does the topic familiarity have on language performance including accuracy,complexity and fluency in the continuation task for high school students?To find out the answers,an empirical study about the continuation task is designed and conducted.The materials in this experiment include two foreign language inputs,that’s “The Mother’s Day” and “The Thrilling Encounter to Polar Bears”and 104 continuation writing samples in total are collected,with the former ones as the group of high topic familiarity and the latter ones that of low topic familiarity.After that,the study performs two types of data procession and analysis.First of all,the Ant Conc3.5.9.0 is used to locate the top 30 keywords and the top 20four-word chucks so as to compare the alignment between two continuation tasks.In addition,L2 SCA,Ant Conc3.5.9.0,Grammarly and SPSS23.0 are employed to compare the language performance including accuracy,complexity and fluency in the two continuation tasks.The finding shows:(1)No matter how familiar the topic is in continuation task,high school students can both imitate the words or phrases that appear in the original texts.But in the task of familiar topic,the linguistic alignment of students’ writing is apparently stronger than that of the unfamiliar one.(2)The topic familiarity has a significant influence on the language performance including accuracy,complexity and fluency in the continuation task for high school students.For one thing,the material of familiar topic is beneficial to advance students’ language performance in accuracy,syntactic complexity and fluency as well.For another,students are capable of producing a higher vocabulary density in the continuation task of unfamiliar topic,which is helpful for their acquisition of vocabulary.This study suggests that topic familiarity is an indispensable factor influencing the continuation task for high school students,and different levels of topic familiarity cultivate students’ second language output in disparate perspectives.Thus,in the actual instruction,foreign language teachers ought to choose topics of the continuation task reasonably and materials with familiar topic are more beneficial to improve the alignment and language performance in the continuation task.