Case Study Of Low Achiever's Oral English Performance Under Continuation Tasks

In recent years,continuation task training,which facilitates the output of language,has been put forward by domestic scholars in the field of language teaching.Wang Chuming(2016)proposed that language output in listening-based oral continuation task was more casual and language accuracy might be improved by writing task.Therefore,A case study design was adopted based on Swain's Output Hypothesis as well as Scaffolding Instruction.The present study attempts to explore empirical evidences for the different effects of oral and written-oral continuation tasks on the oral English performance.Four purposes are specified as follows: 1)To observe and describe the two learners' reaction to the two types of continuation tasks in terms of speech quantity and if the two learners refer to the input text for words,phrases and sentence patterns.2)To observe and describe whether their language accuracy is improved under written-oral continuation task.3)To investigate and report how the two learners comment on the two types of continuation tasks and whether they report any change of their own oral English performance.4)To observe and report whether there is any change in the two learners' score ranking of oral English tests and whether the girl or the boy has made greater progress.The two students who are low achievers in oral English tests were selected as participants.Multiple sources of evidences were collected from two speaking tests,two types of continuation task training materials,texts of the continuation tasks completed by participants and two semi-structured interviews to obtain holistic and in-depth observation.The study includes two five-week phases of intervention with the first phase for oral continuation task and the second for written-oral continuation task.In oral continuation task,the two participants read and listened to the unfinished story within 15 minutes,and then they were asked to finish the story orally.In written-oral continuation task,after 15 minutes' reading and listening,the two participants had 20 minutes to write down what they wanted to speak and then started to speak out without asking for help.All the data were collected by the researcher and analyzed based on between-task and between-participant comparison.The results showed that the speech quantity in written-oral continuation tasks was more than that in oral continuation tasks,both participants refer to input texts for words,phrases,and few sentence patterns but there was no evident difference in the total number of the referential words,phrases and sentences to input texts.What's more,language accuracy is improved under written-oral continuation tasks compared with that under oral continuation tasks and the distribution of grammatical errors is on decline under written-oral continuation tasks.The interviews revealed that the two participants preferred written-oral continuation to oral continuation task.The results of the two speaking tests showed that after the intervention of two types of continuation tasks,the two learners' oral English ability is improved and they both make evident progress in language accuracy.Based on the findings,we can draw the following conclusions: 1)low-scoring high school students can improve their oral English ability through oral and written-oral continuation task training.2)In written oral continuation task,the number of speech quantity is larger and their language is more accurate,compared with those in oral continuation tasks.3)There is no evident difference in the number of referential words,phrases and sentence patterns to input texts.The findings in the present study have some pedagogical implications: First,it is necessary for teachers and students to use the two types of continuation tasks to improve students' oral English performance.Furthermore,the input texts in continuation task training and the hints given by peers or teachers can function as scaffolding for oral English practice.Finally,when performing written-oral continuation tasks,low achievers are more confident and their language accuracy is improved.