Abstract This study investigated the impact of the xu -argument-based continuation on Chinese high school students’ English syntactic complexity captured using verb-argument constructions (VACs) over an 8-week period. Participants were two comparable groups of students: one group worked with English input texts (i.e., E-E), while the other worked with Chinese input texts with the same content (i.e., C-E). The results showed that over time, the E-E group exhibited a greater tendency to use a wider range of VACs, such as caused-motion constructions, attributives, passives, and phrasal verbs. At the same time, they reduced their use of simpler VACs like intransitive-motion and simple transitive constructions, especially when compared to the C-E group. This pattern was also evident in the topic-based writing during the posttest. These findings strongly support the effectiveness of xu -argument-based continuation tasks in promoting the development of L2 VAC knowledge. They suggest that tasks combining language input with output can significantly enhance learners’ ability to use more sophisticated VACs.
Zhang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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