The Effects Of Collaborative Interaction Tasks On EFL Learners’ Oral Achievements

Researches on foreign language learning have found that collaborative interaction tasks in language classrooms are contributive to learners’ target language competence.Besides,the related researches have confirmed that task type affects learners’ collaborative interaction in recent years.While there are few researches on determining learners’ collaboration level in different interaction tasks through linguistic features.Hence,the present study attempts to scrutinize the effects of form-focused interaction task,language-directed interaction task and strategies-directed interaction task on learners’ oral achievements,the lexico-grammatical features of the three types of collaborative interactions and the correlation between learners’ oral achievements and their lexico-grammatical features.The study took 58 students in grade one enrolled in Qin’an No.2 Senior High School in Gansu province as the participants,implementing the three types of tasks for an 8-week experimental study.In the pre-test,the participants were paired into 29 dyads based on their monthly English scores to take part in the Information-Exchange task,with Paired Oral Test Rubric to score each collaborative interaction(0-4.0).Then the 29 dyads were randomly divided into form-focused,language-directed and strategies-directed task group at the same level.In the training program,the three groups of participants learnt the same language knowledge in one lesson but finished form-focused,language-directed and strategies-directed task respectively.In the post-test,the three groups respectively took form-focused,language-directed and strategies-directed task tests,with Paired Oral Test Rubric to score their collaborative interactions,which were then sorted into high-collaboration dyads(0 < 2.5)and low-collaboration dyads(2.5 < 4.0).Then,the transcriptions of all the collaborative interactions were put into the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger program to identify lexico-grammatical features.With all the statistics confirmed,each task group concluded8 effective dyadic interactions,24 totally.There were 17 high-collaboration features and 14 lowcollaboration features with the frequency higher than 0.10.Through SPSS 23.0,using one-way ANOVA with the post hoc tests to compare the oral achievements of the three task groups;using Independent-samples ttests to compare the difference of the lexico-grammatical features between the high-and low-collaboration interactions in the three types of tasks;using Correlation and Regression Analysis to verify the correlation between the learners’ oral achievements and their lexico-grammatical features.The research findings showed,firstly,the language-directed group contained the most highcollaboration dyads,got the highest oral achievement among the three types of task groups and it was significantly higher than the form-focused group’s.The form-focused group contained the most lowcollaboration dyads.The strategies-directed interaction task contained the same high-collaboration dyads as its low-collaboration dyads.There was no significant difference among the oral achievements of the lowcollaboration dyads.Secondly,as for the lexico-grammatical features,the language-directed collaborative interactions contained the most high-collaboration features and the least low-collaboration features.The lowcollaboration features occurred in the three types of interactions had no significant difference.Third,the high-collaboration features had significantly positive correlation with the oral achievements while the lowcollaboration features had no significant correlation with the oral achievements.It proved that different collaborative interaction tasks had effects on learners’ oral achievements.The more high-collaboration features occurred in learners’ oral interactions,the higher oral achievements they would obtain.The language-directed interaction tasks were more appropriate to the medium-level learners in the EFL classroom.