Effects Of Different Types Of Schemas On Alignment And Output Quality In The Continuation Task

The output quality of second language learners,especially their writing level,is not only one of the difficulties in foreign language teaching,but also one of the main problems that foreign language teachers are committed to solving.There have been a lot of researches in the foreign language world on how to improve students’ writing skills.Among them,interaction-based continuation task combines language comprehension and output,understands the content of the preceding text and constantly interacts with it,so as to acquire a second language effectively.Schema theory has been widely used in foreign language teaching and relative research has confirmed that it has positive effects on students’ achievement.But so far,few scholars have done any work to combine it with the research of the continuation task.To discuss different types of schemas activation and its interaction with the learner on the alignment and output can enrich the continuation research and should deserve more attention.This empirical study combines schema theory with the continuation task and aims to investigate the differences in alignment and output quality produced in the continuation task of different types of schemas,which are linguistic schema,content schema and formal schema.The subjects are three classes of non-English majors in a university in Hebei Province,with totally 164 students.The first group(Group A)finishes continuation task with linguistic schema.The second group(Group B)finishes continuation task with content schema.And the third group(Group C)finishes continuation task of formal schema.In this study,One-way ANOVA in SPSS 23.0 was used to compare the lexical and syntactic alignment and the quality of writing in the three groups,and the n-gram function in Ant Conc 3.3.5 was used to compare the differences in syntactic alignment among the three groups.Finally,in the semi-structured interview,3 representative subjects were selected from each group,a total of 9 subjects,to understand their feelings and evaluation about the schema continuation task group that they belong to.These results show that there is no significant difference in lexical alignment among the three groups,all of which have alignment effect with the words in the topic sentences.The intuitiveness of formal schema is convenient for the subjects to extract syntactic structure,so in syntactic alignment,formal schema is better than the other two groups and has differences among these groups.In terms of output quality,subjects could have a deeper understanding of the material by supplementing the relevant background knowledge in the content schema continuation.Therefore,the quality of it is much higher than that of language schema and formal schema,and there is a significant difference.These results can help foreign language teachers and researchers better understand the continuation tasks of different types of schemas on language acquisition and help foreign language teachers reasonably arrange teaching tasks according to the teaching objectives.They can also provide some enlightenment for the teaching and research of the continuation task.