Effects Of Task Complexity And Pre-task Planning On Performance Of Senior High School Students' Oral Production

Oral English teaching in senior high school has always been a difficult point in foreign language teaching.Based on Robinson's cognitive hypothesis(or multiple attention resource model),this study explores the effects of task complexity and pre-task planning types on oral output.Robinson's cognitive hypothesis holds that with the increase of task complexity,the complexity and accuracy of language production will increase together.In addition to task complexity,this study also examined how pre-task planning affect the oral output of the participants.In this study,64 students were randomly selected from two ordinary classes of a Middle School in Nanchang,and were divided into 4 groups.On the basis of previous studies,task complexity was divided into difficult task and simple task according to the number of elements involved(+ /-elements),and pre-task planning was divided into strategic planning and rehearsal planning.This was a 2×2 experiment.In the first group,17 participants adopted strategic planning to complete difficult tasks.In the second group,17 participants adopted rehearsal planning to complete simple tasks.In the third group,17 participants adopted strategic planning to complete difficult tasks.And in the fourth group,13 participants adopted rehearsal planning to complete simple tasks.They all had 15 minutes to prepare.Strategic planning groups were required to prepare according to the given mind map and they were only allowed to write the key words down in order to take notes.Rehearsal planning groups were asked to write down what they were going to output exactly which makes sure that they go through the whole task once already.After the preparation,participants' oral production were recorded by recording equipment.The author collected the notes that participants took during the preparation period and their audio files of their output,and transcribed and analyzed them with Praat,AntWordProfiler,SPSS and other software.Through independent sample T-test,the results show that task complexity has a negative impact on oral fluency.There are significant differences in average pause time and speaking rate between difficult task and simple task,while task complexity improves students' vocabulary complexity and accuracy.Rehearsal planning can improve students' fluency,but it is not helpful to the complexity and accuracy.Strategic planning can significantly improve the complexity of vocabulary.Two-way ANOVA analysis shows that task complexity and pre-task planning have significant main effects on fluency,accuracy and complexity respectively,but there is no significant interactive effect between them.The most important implication of this study to foreign language teaching in China lies in task selection and teaching implementation.To improve the lexical complexity of students' output,teachers can design oral tasks with more elements according to students' English level and guide students to use strategic planning.The purpose of improving students' oral fluency can be achieved by reducing the complexity of task appropriately and students can be guided to make rehearsal planning to rehearse their oral tasks in advance.In order to improve accuracy,teachers can assign oral tasks with more elements and guide students to use strategic planning in the preparation stage.