The Effect Of Writing-task Repetition On English Learners’ Speech Output

Task repetition as one of the task operative variables has placed its weigh on oralproduction in the second language teaching. However, as one type of task repetition,writing task repetition has been rarely used to improve English learners’ speech outputin practical use. This empirical study aims to explore the effects of writing taskrepetition on English learners’ accuracy，fluency and complexity of oral output which isput forward by Skehan (1996) from an information processing perspective. The relativedata analysis will be based on the standards proposed by Ellis and Yuan (2003) forreference.This study is analyzed in both the quantitative and the qualitative way. All of thefive subjects selected are Chinese EFL students. In this two-month study, the subjectswill have a oral task (task one) at first as the pre-task, then they will complete fourconsecutive writing repetitions of task one, after which all of them would conduct asame-content oral task (task one) and different-content oral task (task two) respectivelyas the post-task to test whether this writing task repetition has a positive influence onthe subjects’ oral output.After discussion and analysis, which is based on Swain’s Output Hypothesis andSkehan’s Dual-model System. The results reveal that: in the same-content task, all thesubjects have improved their oral performance significantly; in the different-contenttask, writing repetition has enhanced the lexical complexity and fluency significantlywhile the grammatical complexity and accuracy are not improved remarkably.Meanwhile, it demonstrates that the subjects have consciously distributed theirattentional resources under the circumstances of writing task repetition. Therefore,attentional resources could be distributed in an oriented way during the model of writingtask repetition..The present study is an attempt in exploring the effects of writing task repetition onoral production, with the hope that “writing to speak” would be helpful for Chinese EFLstudents to improve their English oral production and provide some insights to futurestudy.