The Effect Of Post-task Transcribing On Senior High School Students’ Spoken English Learning

According to The Senior High School English Curriculum Standard (2003), theimportance of spoken English is greatly attached to the English teaching in seniorhigh schools. However, it is a fact that spoken English is not paid enough attention insenior high school English teaching. Many students are still weak in their spokenEnglish, especially in some minority areas. Most of the students’ spoken English levelis still low. On the one hand, both the students and teachers spend most of their timeon grammatical rules or language points; on the other hand, they haven’t foundappropriate ways to improve the students speaking ability.This research attempts to adopt post-task transcribing into English speakingteaching, trying to find answers to the following research questions:1) Does post-task transcribing have a positive effect on the students’ speaking ability?2) In what aspects does post-task transcribing improve the students’ speaking ability?3) Among three kinds of post-task transcribing, which one is better to facilitate thestudents’ speaking ability?In this research, thirty–six students from a certain middle school in Pu’er arechosen to be the subjects, who are divided equally into two classes, one is theexperimental class, and the other is the control class. And the eighteen subjects fromthe experimental class are divided into three groups: individual-based transcribinggroup, pair-based transcribing group and teacher-guided transcribing group. Eachgroup students accept corresponding post-transcribing training in their speakingactivities. Yet no post-task activity is adopted in the control class. The study lastseight weeks with different topics for each week. After recording materials onpost-task transcribing are collected and carefully analyzed, it is found that:1) Post-task transcribing does have a positive effect on the students’ speaking ability.2) Post-task transcribing can improve the students’ speaking ability in interest,syntactic accuracy and syntactic complexity.3) All the three kinds of post-task transcribing are, to a certain degree, functional positively in helping the students improve their English speaking ability, but incomparison, teacher-guided post-transcribing is better to facilitate the students’speaking ability.