The Effects Of Different Participatory Structures Of Pre-task Planning On English Writing Performance In Senior High School

Writing is an important part of English learning,and it is also one of the essential indicators to measure students’ comprehensive language competence.Task-based second language acquisition(SLA)studies have found that pre-task planning can influence the fluency,accuracy and complexity of learners’ writing performance.In recent years,many scholars have begun to study the effects of other factors in pre-task planning on writing output.Ellis(2003)explores the participatory factors and defines it as“participatory structure”.He claims that different participatory structures(teacher-led planning,group-based planning and individual planning)during pre-task planning may have different impacts on the fluency,accuracy and complexity of language output.This study explores the effects of three different types of participatory structures during pre-task planning on senior high school students’ English writing performance.Based on Skehan’s limited attention capacity model,Robinson’s cognitive hypothesis and Kellogg’s writing model,this study hopes to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the effects of different participatory structures during pre-task planning on the fluency of learners’ writing performance?(2)What are the effects of different participatory structures during pre-task planning on the accuracy of learners’ writing performance?(3)What are the effects of different participatory structures during pre-task planning on the complexity of learners’ writing performance?In this study,90 students from two natural classes of senior one in No.27 senior high school in Lanzhou were selected as the participants.They were divided into three experimental groups: teacher-led planning group,group-based planning group,and individual planning group.In this study,each group of students was given 10 minutes to plan for the language and content of the production during the pre-task planning.At the same time,participants in each group completed the pre-task planning under the corresponding participatory structures: the teacher-led planning group completed planning under the teacher’s guidance;the group-based planning group completed planning through the interaction of group members;the individual planning group completed planning independently.After pre-task planning,the three groups finished the writing production individually within 20 minutes.The experiment lasted for twelve weeks.The written texts were collected at the end of the experiment.Secondly,fluency,accuracy and complexity were all carefully calculated by the researcher.Finally,the researcher analyzed the experimental data by SPSS 26.0.The experimental results demonstrated that pre-task planning under different participatory structures had significant effects on the fluency and accuracy of learners’ writing performance,but no significant effect on the complexity.The teacher-led pre-task planning produced the highest level of accuracy.The group-based pre-task planning produced the highest level of fluency.The individual pre-task planning produced the highest level of grammar complexity,but no significant effect in this respect.In general,the teacher-led planning group produced relatively balanced results from the perspective of three dimensions of the writing performances.The implication of the present study lies in two aspects.Firstly,teachers should be fully aware of the limited attention resources of foreign language learners,and cultivate and train the fluency,accuracy and complexity of language production based on different teaching objectives.Secondly,teachers play an important role in the teaching process.The results show that the teacher-led planning is as effective as the group-based planning and individual planning.The learners are not constantly required to do their pre-task planning independently.Teacher-led planning and group-based planning can also achieve a better effect.