The Effect of Alignment on the Listening and Speaking Continuation Task

This study aims to examine the effect of alignment on the listening and speaking continuation task (LSCT). A total of 47 Chinese L2 English learners were recruited as participants for the study. They were divided into two groups and were instructed to complete two separate continuation tasks with different input languages (English and Chinese). The scripts of oral continuation performed by the participants were analyzed from four aspects: word frequency, accuracy, fluency, and complexity. The results indicated that the effect of alignment exists in LSCT, especially in terms of lexicon and accuracy. When conducting English LSCT, participants tended to use more frequently the words that appeared in the audio story and paid more attention to the morphological characteristics of words, and participants achieved higher accuracy when the input language was English. However, there was no significant difference in terms of fluency and complexity between English and Chinese LSCT.