Influences Of Tasks On Primary School Students’ Engagement In English Class

The research on second language acquisition around "task" has attracted much attention in the past two decades,but most of the research mainly focuses on the"teaching" method of teachers during the task process,and the state and level of students’ "learning" are greatly ignored.Nowadays,task-based teaching is still widely used in English classrooms in our country.Starting from holistic learning theory,this thesis adopts the conceptual theoretical framework of learner engagement proposed by Philip and Duchesne(2016)to analyze English classrooms in senior primary schools.To study the effect of task type on learner engagement.Based on the overall learning orientation theory of learners,the framework divides learner engagement into four dimensions,namely behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement,emotional engagement,and social engagement.This thesis is based on the above four dimensions.This thesis is based on the actual basis of the content arrangement of the primary school English textbooks of the People’s Education Edition,as well as the actual situation of listening and speaking in primary English classrooms,advocating taskbased teaching,and choosing two interactive tasks of picture information display task and role-playing task under the same unit theme.It takes the type of task as the independent variable and the degree of learner input in the process of completing the task as the dependent variable.On the basis of observing the implementation process of the picture display task and role-playing tasks in the English classroom of the upper grades in primary school,it is further analyzed from the "learner input".The thesis studies how two different task types affect learners’ behavioral,cognitive,emotional and social engagement in the process of completing the task.The thesis found compared with picture displaying task the learners of upper grades in primary school engaged more in the behavior,emotion and social dimensions when completing the role-playing task which was embodied in the behavioral input dimension:the learner produced more words and turns;the emotional input dimension:the learner thought the role-playing task was more interesting and richer;the social input dimension:the learner cooperated to complete more sentences.With the help of the learner input model,the thesis revealed the differences in the cognitive,behavioral,emotional and social inputs of learners in the process of completing the two tasks,and the research conclusions helped to further explore the value of the task and provide teaching inspiration for front-line English teachers to observe the students’ classroom status.