Effect Of Task Types On High School Students' Writing Performance

Task-based language teaching is a teaching method,which is carried out in the completion of a series of communicative tasks.It combines the teaching of language forms and meanings.Tasks are the focus of instructional design,and many foreign language teaching researchers explore the factors that influence task implementation.Most of the previous studies focus on the effects of different oral tasks,task conditions and task features on learners' language use.However,there are few studies on the impact of different types of writing tasks on learners' language production.This study explores the relationship between the task types and the subjects' writing performance with task types as variables through text analysis,which aims to address the relation between accuracy,complexity and fluency in writings and task types and questionnaire,which aims to address the relation between the subjects' self-perception of writing and task types.The study chooses as subjects 154 senior high school students of Grade 2consisting of 3 classes with similar English proficiency in Zhenjiang.Three types of writing tasks with the same topic of argumentation,namely non-material writing,reading-writing and reading-listening-writing,are designed and 154 texts are collected.The texts are evaluated holistically and analytically by using respectively Zou(2001)and Elder et al.(2002)as evaluation criteria.The questionnaire designed by Robinson(2001)is adopted to investigate the relationship between the subjects' self-perception of writing and task types.The findings are: 1)the holistic data show that there is a significance between task types and subjects' writing performance and the subjects performed best in the non-material writing task,and worst in the reading-listening-writing task;2)the analytical data show that there exist a significance between the task types and both fluency and complexity,but no significance with accuracy;3)the survey indicates that there is a significance between task types and the subjects' self-perception of task difficulty,pressure,interest and capacity,but no significance with motivation.These findings indicate that task types have a considerable impact on thesubjects' writing performance as a whole as well as on the fluency and complexity of production.In addition,task types influence greatly on the subjects' self-perception of task difficulty,pressure,interest and capacity.This study implies that 1)various task types and the order in which they are presented need to be considered in writing task design for teachers to play a guiding role in writing instruction;2)we should evaluate our students' writing performance in a variety of writing tasks;3)we are expected to make a choice of task types since it caters to students' affection,motivates their writing,and reduces negative pressure.