A Qualitative Case Study Of Group Activities In A TBLI Class:Perspective Of Activity Theory

Task-based language instruction is one of mainstream modern foreign language teaching methods, which conforms to the ideas of China's English curriculum. The new curriculum emphasizes to develop students integrated competences of using and learning English through being engaged in inquiry-based and cooperative learning activities. Although group activity is one of the commonest organization in TBLI, its effectiveness is far from satisfying. Besides, study on students'group activities process is relatively rare. As Activity Theory is an effective framework for analyzing any human communicative activity process, the present study attempts to employ this framework to explore the actual process of students doing the task in group and effectiveness of TBLI activitiesActivity theory is a part of social culture theory originally developed by Vygotsky, which maintains that the development of human mind is the result of participation in social activities. When communicating and interacting with others in such activities, humans use language and other cultural products (artifact) as mediating tool to realize the meaning construction, and finally it will turn into the individual mental construction. Activity theory is a descriptive framework for the process of social activities and operations,which includes six elements: subject, object, mediation, community, division of labor and the rules. According to the theory, a social activity can be analyzed at three levels:activity, action and operation.Therefore, adopting activity theory as an analytical framework, the present study aims to explore the process of students'group activities. Based on the analysis of the author's classroom observation notes, the texts of the students'final products, the video and radio recordings, which are all from a TBLI class group activity in a senior high school in Nanjing, the study yields the following findings:1. Because of students'different motives and goals, the same task can produce different activities,which means the operations of the activity are different from group to group, person to person, corresponding to the results of Coughland and Duff's (1994).2. Different learning process can generate different learning products, whether they are the explicit products of students'film reviews or the implicit ones of students'participation, cooperation and experience. When a group has a leader and the members are ready to cooperate, its implicit learning products outperform the one without obvious leaders.3. Among the six elements influencing the activity system, students'group activities are mostly influenced by subjects' motives, the use of the tool, the objects which push them to complete the task and the influence of the community. They are less influenced by the division of labor and the rules.