Effects Of Topic Familiarity And Linguistic Proficiency On English Learners' Speech Output On The Basis Of TBLT

In virtue of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), the current study is to analyze the effects of task complexity and task difficulty on learners'task performances on the basis of the Output Hypothesis advanced by Swain (1985) and the Schema Theory put forward by Bartlett (1932). According to Robinson (2001), topic familiarity and linguistic proficiency are taken as variables of task complexity and task difficulty from the cognitive aspects and learners'factors, and they are also considered to be two independent variables. Our study is in an attempt to explore the effects of the above two factors on learners'oral performances. The subjects are 16 sophomores of English-majors from the same class in a college. According to the results in the exams, they are divided into two groups, one is of high-proficiency level and the other is of low-proficiency level, each group being composed of 8 students. In the procedure, they are asked to give their opinions on four given topics with different degree of familiarity. The whole process is video-taped with a tape recorder. The qualities of the participants'speech output are evaluated by three indexes of accuracy, fluency and complexity proposed by Skehan (1996). The measures of these three indexes we used are adopted from Yuan and Ellis (2003) with minor modifications.The results show that the two independent variables have some effects on the three dependent variables. As to the effects of topic familiarity, it proves to have certain effects in some aspects since we have taken two indexes into consideration of the three dependent variables of fluency, complexity and accuracy. The topic familiarity seems to have some influences on one of the two indexes of each variable, since the participants prove to have a better performance on the aspect of Rate B, Syntactic complexity (SV) and Error-free clauses (E-F-C) but with no difference in the aspect of Rate A, syntactic variety (SV) and correct verb forms(C-VFS). While being the other independent variables, the linguistic proficiency comes to produce big influence on these three dependent variables of the five aspects of Rate A, Rate B, syntactic variety(SV), correct verb forms (C-VFS)and Error-free clauses (E-F-C)except for the index of Syntactic variety(SV). The high proficiency groups do better in these five aspects except for the syntactic variety (SV) which the two groups seem to have no big difference and the low-proficiency group even does better than the high-proficiency group which may be due to some coincidences or deviations. The research findings have shown one aspect of the exact impact of topic familiarity and linguistic proficiency on learners'speech output.This study is based on empirical study, our final goal behind this research is to supply reliable and valuable information for scientific TBLT syllabus design, it is also intended to provide some suggestions on how to organize and sequence tasks, as well as on how to choose the effective oral topics for teaching. In such a way, the aspects of learners'speech fluency, linguistic accuracy, and complexity will be greatly fostered.