A Textual Analysis of Post-reading Writings in Light of the Alignment Effect and Its Implications on Teaching Writing to EFL Learners

摘要

As is suggested by the Alignment Effect, EFL writings are featured by remarkable textual qualities when they are finished after close-reading of model texts. With textual analyzers, this research collects data of lexical complexity, syntactic complexity and textual coherence of 126 pieces of post-reading writings by EFL. After the analysis, the research finds simple words dominate while complex content words rarely occur. Content verbs, adjectives, and adverbials show much less diversity than nouns. The EFL writers produce full and long sentences which are mainly compound and simple, but need improvements in composing imbedded dependent clauses and complex noun phrases. Due to connectives abuse and loose semantics, sentences within paragraphs are poorly connected, while paragraphs run smooth from one to another. The textual features of post-reading writings yield some pedagogical references to the teaching of writing to EFL learners.