A Study of Interactive Alignment in EFL Reading-to-Writing Continuation Tasks

Abstract

The reading-to-writing continuation task has been used in the Chinese national matriculation English test due to its apparent interactive alignment effect. But empirical studies of the alignment effect and how it happens are limited. Herein, this paper reports on a study following Wang’s (2015) research to investigate whether this interactive alignment effect actually occurs in EFL learning and how it functions in continuation tasks with the think-aloud method to collect qualitative data from two participants. The participants’ continuation works were analyzed and interviews were carried out to obtain information about their thinking process. The results show that there are strong connections between what students read and their continuation writing. The results confirm that there is an alignment effect at both the content and language levels in continuation tasks. Readers consciously tend to align the content of their writing with that of the original text across five dimensions: entity (person and object), time, space, causation/causality, and motivation/intentionality. Meanwhile, language alignment is highly related to the act of rereading, which enables the would-be writer to look for the certain vocabulary, learn the grammatical structures, and check for the unknown words. The continuation task facilitates various interactions among the text, the reader, and their resulting writing work. Furthermore, learners use strategies like rereading and “mining” that enable them to engage in creative expression in the writing tasks. This study theoretically highlights the importance of alignment effect in language learning and has practical implications for using CT in reading-to-writing task design and writing pedagogy in EFL classrooms. Teachers can design and use continuation tasks to promote students’ reading ability and overall language development.