A Study On The Influence Of Textual Enhancement On Alignment Effect Of Comparative Continuation On Senior High School Learners’ EFL Writing

Comparative Continuation(CC)is a variant put forward by Wang Chuming(2018)in view of the limitations of reading-writing continuation.Through CC,learners can increase the number of times of reading back to the previous article and strengthen the interaction.Textual enhancement is a kind of input reinforcement,which can attract learners’ attention through different forms of enhancement of the target structure,urge learners to allocate attention reasonably and pay more attention to the target language structure,which is beneficial to learners’ language acquisition.Therefore,this study chooses students of a middle school as the research subjects to explore the alignment effect of comparative continuation under the condition of textual enhancement.Through the quantitative research in this study,these three questions will be answered next:(1)What are the alignment effects of the text-enhanced comparative continuation on middle school students’ writing performance in terms of the vocabulary and phrases?(2)What are the alignment effects of the text-enhanced comparative continuation on middle school students’ writing performance in terms of the sentence level(subordinate clauses)?(3)What are the alignment effects of the text-enhanced comparative continuation on middle students’ writing errors?(error types and error rates)The subjects of this study are from two parallel classes in Grade one of Shuixiang Middle School in Yongjing County,Gansu Province,including 40 students in EG and 40 students in CG.Everything is equal except that the reading materials of EG are strengthened by the text,that is,the target structure is italic and bold,while the reading materials of CG are not processed.The two classes received the same comparative writing once a week for a total of three weeks.The tool of Ant Conc is applied to measure the differences of alignment effects of two classes with the condition of CC.The main results are as follows:(1)Textual enhancement can improve the alignment effect of students’ CC at the lexical level,and the experimental class tends to use different forms of strengthened words,the difference between the two classes is significant.(2)Textual enhancement can reinforce the alignment effect between students and the previous text at the level of three-word or four-word phrases,EG uses more phrases,and the difference between the two classes is closely significant.(3)Textual enhancement can promote students to align with the previous text at the clause level,Students in EG use more clauses in the CC,and the difference between the two classes is very significant.The results of this study bring some implications to English writing teaching.The integration of input reinforcement in CC can enhance learners’ attention to specific language forms to a great extent,thus increase the interaction with the enhanced text,and finally enhance the alignment effect with the previous texts.On the one hand,it is helpful to cultivate students’ speculative ability and creativity,and at the same time,it can promote students’ acquisition and usage of language.It well embodies Professor Wang’s(2017)principle of “Learn together,Use together”(LTUT).