The Effects Of Text Complexity On English Learning Outcomes Of Students From Secondary Vocational And Technical Schools

Secondary vocational education is an important part of China's education system and is essential to prepare basic skilled people for economic and social development.It has also cultivated front-line technical persons who have comprehensive professional ability for our society.As secondary vocational education focuses more on employment,students put more efforts into professional skills courses.Consequently,they lack education on liberal arts courses.As a compulsory course for all majors,public English in secondary vocational schools is beneficial to improving English proficiency of students and can facilitate their employment and further study.As the main teaching resources,English textbooks are the core reference for both teachers and students.The outcomes of secondary vocational students' English learning will be affected by the text complexity of textbooks and the needs of teachers' lesson preparation.Therefore,in this study,the researcher chose New Model English,a public English textbook used in a Guangzhou Secondary Vocational School as object of study,and selected the teaching contents,including 3 units and 15 texts in total,according to the curriculum outline.The participants of this study were Grade one students majoring in preschool education.An intervention in the study lasted from September,2018 to January 2019.This study adopts a mixed method and the instrument is "Eng-editor".First,the researcher conducted a quantitative analysis of complexity of textbooks.Then,the researcher and teachers adapted the textbook to high,medium and low complexity levels to conduct the quasi-experimental study.Teaching plans were designed according to three adapted versions of textbooks and complexity of students' writings is chosen to be the measure of students' learning outcomes.The researcher conducted quantitative analysis on students' writing samples of writing tasks in every unit of the textbook.Three major findings are as follows :1)lexical complexity and text complexity have statistically significant positive effects on secondary vocational students' learning outcomes;2)a significant monadic linear regression relationship existed between vocabulary coverage of the textbooks of senior high schools and higher level schools and students' writing production;and 3)proportion of difficult words in the textbooks have significant effects on students' vocabulary development.Results demonstrate that there is a significant relationship between text complexity and students' learning outcomes,and therefore,using textbooks with higher level of text complexity can help students enrich their vocabulary in writing and improve text complexity.Moreover,syntactic complexity of texts does not have significant effects on students' learning outcomes,which is in accordance with theories developed by researchers in linguistics.This study aims to point out significance of secondary vocational public English and to examine the effectiveness and practicality of secondary vocational public English teaching materials.Based on the research results,it is suggested that textbook writers should consider students' actual English proficiency level to make text complexity more appropriate.Furthermore,secondary vocational schools and public English teachers should be more careful in selecting and using teaching materials.