Influences Of Needs-based CALL Tasks On Form-meaning Balance In EFL Writing

English writing is an indispensable part in foreign language teaching. However, in the traditional teacher-centered education system, teachers only focus on students’ scores while ignoring the students’ engagement into the writing process as well as awareness of the form of language and meaning of attention, leading to the students’ unbalance in form and meaning. In recent years, with the development of modern language learning theory, instructional design theory based on student needs provides a theoretical basis for a solution to this problem. At the same time, wide use of CALL applications in the field of teaching also provides a broader space to this kind of teaching practice and research.A needs-based CALL writing research was conducted on a group of biomedical majors in Taiyuan University of Technology. These participants are all in grade one. This research is based on students’ needs in writing and the aim of this research is to study the influence of needs-based CALL writing to students’ awareness of form and meaning in writing. At the same time, the researcher also explores other facilitating or impeding factors on participants’writing development.Qualitative research methods and data analysis are employed in this paper. Research data and materials are from student background survey, need assessment, written interviews, student writing products, observation notes of the researcher and course evaluation (written interview Ⅲ). The main findings are as follows:1、Deductive tasks strengthen the students’ attention to the form of writing, inductive type of tasks deepen students’ awareness of meaning in reading material. Whereas, the real-world tasks (communication, opinion exchange) keep the students’eyes on both form and meaning in writing.2、After10weeks of writing training, students’writing balance in the language form and meaning has improved to some extent, but due to the limitation of students’ cognitive ability and influence by mother language, the needs-based CALL writing tasks didn’t solve the unbalance of form and meaning fundamentally.3、Needs-based CALL writing tasks can arouse students’ interest and make them feel confidence in writing in a short time. Different attitude and motivation of the students lead to different writing performance in needs-based CALL writing tasks.4、During the process of writing, many other factors also affect students’ writing products. The extent of students’ self-recognition, keep interesting and motivational to this project, attitude of teachers and peers are also to some extent affect the development of students’ writing.The findings discussed above shows that teachers should try to understand students’needs in order to promote students to develop a better writing ability. At the same time, teachers should use various types of task to help students improve their writing ability and heighten students’ form-meaning awareness in writing, and at the same time, the form-meaning balance is improved in their written products.