A Study On Factors Affecting Secondary School Students' Oral Task Performance

The study in this paper is on the factors that affect secondary school students' oral task performance. Research into task-based learning became popular in our country since the beginning of this century. The Chinese Ministry of education enacted the 'New English Curriculum' in 2001. In this criterion, task-based learning was stipulated as one of the main learning approaches in Chinese secondary school English classes. This learning approach can inspire and cultivate the students' interests in studying English, help them build up self-confidence and let them possess the ability and skills to exercise the language. Task-based learning can also ground the students in their development and life-long study. The new curriculum encourages the English teachers use task-based learning in their teaching experiences, to endow the new meaning to the English teaching.Some foreign researchers have produced results by surveys on the factors affecting task-based learning in English classes. The British scholar Susan Halliwell pointed out that competitiveness and anxiety could affect adults' task performance when they learned a second language. Kathleen M. Bailey thought that motivation should be one factor that has an effect on the students' task performance. The American researcher Patricia A. Richard-Amato put forward that the affective factors including attitudes, motivation, level of anxiety, and positive school and community environment can improve the student's task -based learning.Before this investigation, I observed twenty-eight secondary school English classes in Jilin region. Through observation I got some interrelated information to design this study.The research was done in an English class competition which was held in April 2004. The instruments used for the study comprised classroom observation and focused interview. The results indicate: the affecting factors that had been mentioned by the foreign scholars are not obvious in the Chinese English classes. The factors that affect on the Chinese secondary school students' oral task performance mainly include the teachers' instruction, teachers' understanding and attitude to task-based learning, teachers' language level, and their guidance in the class. Furthermore, the large size class in secondary schools can interfere with the way in which the individual students take part in the activities in task-based learning. In addition, the textbook that is adopted in task-based learning is difficult for the students to understand and the quantity of the vocabulary is too much. All these problems need to be solved urgently by the English teaching researchers.The study results of this paper affirm the stimulative effect of task-based learning in Chinese secondary school students' English studying. At the same time, the results also indicate the limitation of task-based learning in the Chinese secondary school Englishteaching model. They are still the study directions for the English teaching researchers to overcome these limitation, let task-based learning adapt to the development of the Chinese secondary school English teaching.