Abstract：Abstract: It has been repeatedly confirmed that the reading-writing integrated continuation task has an alignment effect in L2 learning of English. This effect, however, remains to be verified in the learning of other languages. Learning Chinese as a second language (L2-Chinese) is especially suited for this testing because the Chinese language has a unique written system with its words indistinct from characters in print. This written system may cause reading difficulty for L2-Chinese learners and weaken the alignment effect in using the continuation task. The present study set out to examine the effect of two print types on the performance of the continuation task, with one type exhibiting word-based print and the other presenting the normal character-based print. Subjects of the study were intermediate L2-Chinese learners. Results show that i) although both types of print produced an alignment effect, the effect associated with the word-based print was stronger, ii) alignment effect occurred in such linguistic structures as words, lexical chunks and syntactic structures, and its strength varied with different structures, iii) the word-based print was conducive to enhancing reading comprehension and reducing errors in the continuations although errors persisted in a small number of structures. These findings testified the alignment effect of the continuation task in L2-Chinese and pointed to an easy and effective way to the enhancement of this effect in L2-Chinese learning.
Key words: word-based print; Chinese as a second language; the continuation task; alignment effect
