The Effects Of Task Planning On Fluency, Accuracy And Complexity In Story-Retelling Oral Production Of Senior One Students'

Recently, with the upsurge of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) and the exploration of means to achieve the balanced development of linguistic meaning and form, the field of Second Language Acquisition has been witnessing the emergence of new focus—the research investigating various aspects of L2 learners'performance of task, especially the balanced development of three aspects (fluency, complexity and accuracy) of L2 production (Ellis,2005). But according to the information processing theory (Anderson,1995;Van Pattern,1990,1994), with limited processing capacity, learners don't have enough resources to notice all aspects of language performance during oral performance. As a result, there is a competition for attention resources among fluency, accuracy and complexity, and produced"trade-off effects"(Skehan, 1996). However, the opportunity to plan language and propositional content of task before or during performance task will lessen communicative stress and enable learners to regulate cognitive load and channel attention resources to three aspects so as to compensate for this limitation of processing capacity and make them develop in a balanced way.Based on the framework of the information-processing theory, Levelt's model of speech production, task-based language teaching, and the results of previous studies on the effects of planning in oral performance, this thesis,under the circumstance of advocating TBLT in English New Curriculum Standards of Senior School in China, investigates the effects of three types of task planning on fluency, complexity and accuracy in story-retelling by means of experiment. The present study tries to explore the regularity of the effects of planning on oral performance and effective teaching ways to achieve balanced development between linguistic meaning and form.The subjects of the present study were 32 senior one students. They were evenly divided into four groups: one was the controlled group, i.e. no-planning group; the other three groups were experimental groups, i.e. pre-task planning group, on-line planning group and integrated planning group. The four groups were required to retell the story from serial pictures with different task planning conditions respectively. The stories were recorded and then transcribed. Then the fluency, accuracy and complexity were calculated by Yuan & Ellis'criteria (2003). The data collected were analyzed by statistic program for social sciences (SPSS).The results showed that different task planning conditions had different effect on different aspects of subjects'oral performance (fluency, accuracy and complexity). Firstly, integrated planning and pre-task planning had positive effect on fluency whereas on-line planning resulted in lower fluency; Secondly, integrated planning and on-line planning had positive effect on accuracy whereas pre-task planning had no distinctive effect on accuracy; Besides, with the limitation of language proficiency, three kinds of task planning had no positive effect on complexity, although all aspects of complexity can benefit from three kinds of task planning.These results have some implications on English teaching in senior school: teachers should pay more attention to the processing limitations. Due to the fact that different task planning conditions can promote different aspects of subjects'oral performance (fluency, accuracy and complexity), teachers should design different task planning conditions to put learners in and train their three aspects (fluency, accuracy and complexity) of oral production respectively. Besides, the standard of complexity of language performance can not be set too high in oral test for senior students.