The Influence Of Focusing On Task In Students' Language Output In High School English Reading Class

Due to the emergency of the concept of focus on form, (the following abbreviations FOF), researches on FOF are very popular among educational research field. And subsequently FOF instruction has become a beloved teaching method in English teaching.FOF instruction absorbs the advantages of grammar teaching method and task-based approach, and gives consideration to both form and meaning in meaning-oriented class, but not just only focus on language form or meaning. Thus, it overcomes the problems of focusing on meaning or forms only generated by the teaching methods of the past.Reading in English is a good way in which students are able to learn language forms in complete context; however, students pay little attention to forms. For instance, they may neglect functional words and sentences structure when reading. In order to explore beneficial patterns of focus on form in reading, and improve students’ attention to form in reading as well, this thesis selects cloze and text reconstruction as the text modes to provide students with familiar linguistic context, and three research questions will be raised:1) Which activity has better effect on output? 2) Which activity can catch students’more attention to form? 3)What are the students’attitudes towards the two activities? Based on those three research questions, the author conducted a small quasi-experimental research, in which 12 senior Ⅱ students are selected randomly from Quzhou NO.3 middle school. The students are divided into four groups, and required to complete the cloze and text reconstruction cooperatively. The author offers a familiar linguistic context to the students and the students should ensure the correctness of the statement at the same time according to their own comprehension.Through comparing talk turns, language-related episodes and the whole discussion process in cloze and text reconstruction, three findings are concluded as follows:1) Cloze and text reconstruction can both catch students attention effectively to meaning and form. There is no significant difference in talk turns while difference is significant on meaning turns, cloze possesses less form turns than text reconstruction, but difference is not significant on form turns.2) The meaning correct rate in cloze is lower while higher in form correct rate. Cloze task itself is more conducive to students to complete language form learning.3)The proposition of meaning-form-based episodes in cloze is twice more than that in text reconstruction, the rate of form-based knowledge source in text reconstruction is much higher, and about one third answers in cloze are based on meaning. Besides, the author find out that students are easy to neglect articles in text reconstruction but its coverage of language form is wider. Students are puzzled about sentence structure in cloze, yet they think the difficult point in text reconstruction is vocabulary and phrases.On these grounds, teachers can choose different tasks depending on students’ different needs and English levels and give appropriate guidance in time when students operate tasks to make them master language forms in abundant context and improve students’ language fluency and accuracy.