Abstract:

The study compares the alignment effects of two reading writing integrated tasks, namely, continuing a story and rewriting the story from the perspective of a different character, by measuring the ratio of T units involving explicit use and implicit use of the source text in 24 participants’ written productions. The influence of interpersonal interaction in class is also studied through the comparison of their written productions before and after class. The thinking aloud method was used to collect introspective data about how they completed the tasks to give insight into the results from the quantitative analyses. The study found that T unit ratio of source text use was significantly higher in the rewriting productions than the continuation ones, in particular implicit use. The rewriting task is believed to encourage learners to interact more frequently with the source text and align with it at both the situational and the linguistic levels. On the other hand, interpersonal interactions were not found to enhance either task’s alignment effect. The ratio of implicit source text use was in fact lower in the rewriting group’s works after they attended class. Nevertheless, personal interactions in class proved to further promote leaners’ interaction with and deeper understanding of the source text.