Assessing writing quality in story continuation writing tasks: The role of linguistic alignment

The story continuation writing task (SCWT) has emerged as an effective pedagogical and assessment tool. To date, most studies on linguistic alignment in the SCWT have focused on its learning benefits, with few exploring it from an assessment perspective. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the relationship between linguistic alignment and writing scores in the SCWT to identify the target abilities measured by alignment with the reading passage, which is considered as a unique construct of the SCWT within the theoretical framework of xu-argument. Our data consist of 99 writing samples produced for a continuation task by 99 Chinese high-school English as a foreign language learners. Building on previous studies, we measure alignment in three dimensions: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. The study finds that: 1) learners’ continuations tend to align closely with the reading passage, primarily through the reuse of content words and syntactic structures and further characterized by a high degree of semantic similarity; 2) higher alignment levels do not necessarily correlate with higher writing quality. Specifically, the overlap of content words, and noun and verb synonyms negatively correlates with writing scores, while semantic similarity has a positive correlation with writing scores. These results suggest that alignment may be perceived differently from pedagogical and assessment perspectives. Furthermore, the construct of linguistic alignment in the SCWT is closely related to the cohesion and creativity of the continued story. The implications of these findings for revising the SCWT rating rubrics are discussed.