Effects Of Different Task Planning On Writing Performance Of Senior High School 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 write 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,the trade-off effect,and the results of previous studies on the effects of planning in write 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 narrative writing by means of experiment.The present study tries to explore the regularity of the effects of planning on writing performance and effective teaching ways to achieve balanced development between linguistic meaning and form.This research aims to explore whether different task planning improve students' writing competence,and fluency,complexity and accuracy in writing.And explore students' perceptions of different types of task planning through questionnaire and retrospective interview.The participants of this study were 45 senior one students.They were evenly divided into three groups: pre-task planning group,on-line planning group and pre-task and within-task planning group.The three groups were required to write the narrative story from serial pictures with different task planning conditions respectively.The stories were collected.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' writing performance(fluency,accuracy and complexity).Firstly,pre-task andwithin-task planning and pre-task planning had positive effect on fluency whereas within-task planning resulted in lower fluency;Secondly,pre-task and within-task planning and within-task 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.Three task planning all improve students' writing scores,but the pre-task planning and pre-task and within-task planning improve writing scores better,and they all believe that task planning is helpful for them in writing.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' writing 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 writing production respectively.