The Effect Of Prompt Type In Task Design On EFL Writing Of High School Students

The 1990 s has seen great interest in task-based language testing(LT).Yet little is known about how design tasks and what task conditions can make learners pay attention to specific aspects of the language they learn.Much research on task design often focuses task difficulty and task complexity in college students.Yet,less is understood about EFL secondary school learners' writing and how their written performance is influenced by prompt type of task design.In view of this,based on Skehan's(1998)test model of L2 performance,this thesis explores prompt types of task design(a single outline prompt v.s both picture and outline prompts)on adolescent learners' holistic writing quality and performance(syntactic and lexical complexity,accuracy and fluency).The research questions are:1)Do prompt types influence students' holistic writing quality?2)Do prompt types influence students' writing performance in recommendation letter writing and narrative writing?3)What are the predictive factors of learners' holistic writing quality?Participants in this study were senior high school students from science class in grade two in Jiangxi Province(18 girls and 28 boys).46 students joined the experiment voluntarily from beginning to end during one month and continually finished 4 writing tasks(2 prompt types x 2 genres).The holistic writing quality of184 compositions of four kind writing tasks were evaluated by three experienced raters according to the 5-scale national college entrance examination scoring standard.The written performance of their writings was analyzed by L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer in terms of fluency,lexical and syntactic complexity while accuracy was evaluated by two experienced raters.Finally,all the data was analyzed by SPSS 24.0.Data analysis reveals that: 1)Prompt types influence students' holistic writing quality.Task without picture prompt gains higher scores than task with picture prompt.It maybe that participants get rare training in picture prompt writing.Tasks with picture prompt are harder in that test takers need to observe,analyze and interpret picture input first,then compose their ideas.2)Prompt type affect written production of learners' writing.In the recommendation letter writing,task with single prompt(outline)gained higher lexical complexity but lower accuracy.In the narratives,task with dual prompts(picture and outline)acquired higher syntactic complexity.3)Thepredictive factors of learners' holistic writing quality include lexical and syntactic complexity and accuracy(CTTR,DC/C and EFT/S).These three factors combined can account for 23.4%(R2=.234)of the variance in the evaluation of compositions in four writing tasks.Based on the findings of this study,some implications are advocated to promote task-bask language teaching and testing.1)prompts in writing test should be diversified to develop and examine English learners comprehensive skills.2)Test designers should be aware of different aspects of task design that influence L2 performance.Because the limited resource of attention capacity,task designers should consider to elicit different aspects of written performance.3)Instructors should cultivate students writing abilities with deliberate practice.