A Study On Effect Of Pre-task Planning Activities On English Writing Of High School Students

With the wide use of task-based approach in second language teaching,pre-task planning,as a greatly important part of pre-task activities,is the emerging field which attracts the attention of many linguists.Many studies have showed that pre-task planning can improve the quality of language production of second language learners to a certain degree.To be more specific,many previous studies have found that strategic planning greatly facilitates complexity and fluency in second language production,especially in oral field,while the effects of strategic planning on accuracy are not clear-cut.The present study focuses on exploring the effect of different types of pre-task planning activities on English writing of high school students of different levels of language proficiency so as to provide practical guidance for the effective implementation of English writing classes of middle school.By adopting experimental research,the present study focuses on specifying the content of pre-task planning as three different pre-task activities to show their effects on the written production of high school students which is evaluated from three dimensions: fluency,accuracy and complexity.The present study is aimed at answering the following two research questions: 1)What effect does strategic planning have on learners' written performance who are of various levels of language proficiency ? 2)What effect does interaction between learners' proficiency levels and types of strategic planning have on their written performance? Chinese learners of English from the H private high school in Wuhan with different levels of language proficiency participate in this argumentative writing study: there were high level learners,intermediate level learners and low level learners.All the participants have to complete a writing task each week and the study lasts for three weeks.The number of S-nodes per T-unit and number of word types divided by the square root of two times the total number of words are operationalised as the linguistic complexity of sentences and lexical complexity separately.Error-free S-nodes per total S-nodes and the number of errors per words are two measures of the linguistic accuracy.The number of words per T-unit is examined as a measure of linguistic fluency.The present study answers two questions.1)The study shows that strategic planning has positive effect on the accuracy,fluency and complexity of learners' written production,however,the degree of which depends on the proficiency levels of learners.The intermediate and low level learners greatly benefit from planned conditions,but high level group benefits least from the opportunity to plan in the case of complexity,accuracy and fluency.To be more specific,the intermediate level learners performs the planned tasks at the similar level of fluency,accuracy and complexity to the high level group,in other words,this group is able to catch up with the high level group in planned tasks;The low level learners shows significant increase in three dimensions of written production in the planned tasks.However,there is no significant difference between two times' language production of high-level participants and pre-task preparation activities have a very limited effect on language production of participants at this level.2)The study shows that there is no interaction effect between learners' proficiency levels and types of strategic planning on their written performance,however learners' language proficiency and the type of pre-task planning activities have a significant main effect on the English writing.To bemore specific,on the one hand,the quality of language production of high-level and intermediate-level participants is significantly higher than that of low-level participants,but there is no significant difference in the quality of language production of high-level and intermediate-level participants;on the other hand,independent pre-task planning has the most significant effect on improving the quality of language production,followed by focused pre-task planning,and L2 input pre-task planning has the least effect on improving the quality of language production.In conclusion,different from several previous researches,the present study shows that strategic planning has a positive effect on accuracy although the degree of its effect depends highly on the proficiency level of learners and types of pre-task planning activities.Besides that,the present study further enriches Skehan's cognitive model.The study shows that learners can well balance the three aspects of language production as long as the pre-task planning time is reasonably allocated and the types of pre-task planning activities are appropriate.What's more,the present study tests the validity of Arthur's vocabulary diversity measurement,which cannot effectively circumvent the impact of text length on vocabulary types.At last,the implication of this study on English writing classes in high school lies in three aspects.Firstly,teachers should realize the necessity of pre-task planning activities in written classes and plan the teaching procedures scientifically so as to make learners fully prepared before actual writing tasks;secondly,teachers should choose the appropriate pre-task planning activity according to the language proficiency of learners;lastly,teachers should guide learners while they are performing the per-task panning activities,which may help learners spare their limited attentional resources to the dimensions of written production they haven't noticed before,then reaching the balance of three dimensions of written production.