Wang (2012) posits that the continuation task serves as a method to facilitate writing practice in conjunction with reading comprehension in foreign language teaching. This effective approach of foreign language teaching is grounded in the positive interaction between learners and the material, as well as learners’ repeating and imitating the language forms in the original material. In other words, for students to successfully complete the continuation task, they have to construct a situation model on the condition that they can understand the reading material, and finally create an ending that coheres or aligns with the previously constructed situation model.
2.2 Theoretical Framework
This thesis is theoretically grounded in interactive alignment model, input hypothesis and output hypothesis. These three theories will be described in the following details.
2.2.1 Interactive Alignment Model
The interactive alignment model was proposed by Pickering and Garrod (2004) and they believe that alignment is vital in daily dialogue. It is that there is aligned representation during the communication between the interlocutors and this will contribute to understand each other and reduce the differences of language of the interlocutors, which allow for the continuation of the interactive dialogue with each other (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). In other words, when the dialogue occurs, the interlocutors make dynamic adjustments to cooperate with each other in order to understand each other and avoid misunderstanding. During the dialogue, with the interaction, the interlocutors’ expression is becoming aligned from different aspects, such as syntactic structures (Costa et al., 2008), and their language becomes more similar (Sinclair & Fernández, 2023), which makes the conversation smooth. Since the alignment comes along with the interaction, with the stronger interaction, the alignment will be stronger (Pickering and Garrod, 2004; Xie & Zhu, 2023).
Chapter Three Research Methodology ..................... 22
3.1 Research Questions ................... 22
3.2 Research Subjects ............................... 22
Chapter Four Results and Findings............................ 37
4.1 Results of Questionnaire ................................. 37
4.2 Results of Writing Practice .............................. 38
Chapter Five Discussion ............................... 58
5.1 The Effect on Lexical Features .................... 58
5.2 The Effect on Syntactic Features .................. 59
Chapter Four Results and Findings
4.1 Results of Questionnaire
In this research, through first questionnaire, the number of valid questionnaires received is 39 totally. Among them, twenty-eight of the students have been exposed to the continuation task while ten students haven’t been exposed to the continuation task. These students pay attention to the content (n=18) and logic (n=10) of the given text mostly. From this questionnaire, it is found that some factors influence students’ continuation task, such as poor expression ability, inability to understand the original text and so on, and the proportion is shown in figure 4-1.
Chapter Six Conclusion
6.1 Summary of the Major Findings
This study investigates the impact of incorporating continuation tasks into college English writing teaching, analyzing its effects across three distinct linguistic levels—lexical, syntactic, and discourse—each of which demonstrates unique characteristics.
Firstly, from the lexical level, lexical complexity is analyzed. It shows that the control group doesn’t change significantly without the application of continuation task in lexical complexity since significant difference is not exhibited in lexical density, lexical sophistication and lexical diversity while the experimental group shows significant difference in the lexical sophistication and lexical diversity since statistical signi
