Effect of Alignment on Text Cohesion in the Continuation Task

Abstract

A continuation task provides learners with a text with its ending removed and requires them to complete it through writing in a most coherent and logical way. The current study investigated (a) whether the continuation task had a positive effect on text cohesion and (b) whether texts produced by pairs exhibited higher cohesion than those produced by individual learners. A total of 80 college students were randomly assigned to one of three task conditions: 1) 40 students working in pairs in a continuation task; 2) 20 working individually in a continuation task; and 3) 20 working individually in a picture writing task. Text cohesion was analyzed by using three indices from Coh-metrix: Argument Overlap, Latent Semantic Analysis, and Causal Cohesion. Moreover, the collaborative dialogue and think-aloud protocols were collected and transcribed for identifying language-related episodes (LREs). The results showed that learners in Condition 1 produced the highest text cohesion while those in Conditions 3 the lowest. Furthermore, learners in Condition 1 produced more cohesion-related LREs, especially proportionally more correctly resolved LREs than those in Conditions 2 and 3. The implications of these findings from the perspective of alignment are discussed.

Exploring the Effects of the Continuation Task on Syntactic Complexity in Second Language Writing

“…Study suggested that learners continuing the English-version story made significantly fewer errors than those did the Chinese-version task, which verified the entailment of alignment in the continuation task. Besides, a good number studies have investigated how the alignment in the continuation task manipulates, such as alignment effects in the translation continuation task (Xu, 2016), effect of alignment on text cohesion (Jiang, 2016), and effects of alignment in the continuation task on L2 Chinese writing (Wang, 2016).…”