Effects Of Task Repetition With Corrective Feedback On College English Learners’Oral Performance

With the quick advance of economic globalization and China’s gradual integration into the world, the command of spoken English becomes indispensable for communication with other peoples of the world. The effective communication is concerned with three aspects of oral performance, including fluency, complexity and accuracy (Skehan1996a,1996b,1998). However, according to the theory of the information processing (Anderson,1995; Van Pattern,1990), with the limited processing capacity, learners are incapable of distributing the attention equally to the three aspects of oral production. There exists trade-off (Skehan&Foster,1997) effects among fluency, complexity and accuracy in learners’oral performance; hence the three different aspects of language vie for attention. How to channel attention resources to the three aspects and make them develop in a balanced way is a key point for the improvement and balance of oral performance.This paper will first review the relevant theories and studies about task repetition, and summarize the deficiency of the previous studies. Then it will point out the difference of the study from the previous ones. Previously, it’s considered that task repetition could reduce the learners’cognitive stress in understanding the content of the task, but other studies show that the effects of task repetition could not transfer to the performance of a new oral task. Based on the theory of Levelt’s Model of Speech Production and Skehan’s Dual-model System, the study investigates the effects of task repetition with corrective feedback on the three aspects (fluency, complexity and accuracy) of oral performance. And this study hypothesizes that:the effects of task repetition with corrective feedback could transfer to the performance of a new task. An empirical study is made to confirm the hypothesis.Twenty-one non-English undergraduates in Shanxi Medical University were divided into three groups with seven students in each group to participate in the experiment. Centering on the research questions, the study follows the pattern of pretesting, testing and post-testing to find out the influences of task repetition on oral performance. The three research questions are the following:(1) Does repeating a task without feedback have any influence on the performance of the same task?(2) Does repeating the same task with feedback have any effect on the performance of the same task?(3) Does repeating the same task with corrective feedback have any effect on the performance of a new task? A pre-test was conducted before the experiment to ensure that the English proficiency of three groups of students was equivalent. During the experiment the three groups performed the oral narrative task (story retelling) in three different task conditions. The story is selected from the famous comics Vater and Sohn. The experiment is conducted in three laboratories. In the end, the stories they told are recorded in the tape and then transcribed. The data collected from the transcriptions of the experiment was analyzed through ANOVAs and Independent Samples T-test in SPSS17.0to find the different effects concerning fluency, complexity and accuracy of oral performance among the three groups. The measures employed in the study were based on the three aspects of learners’oral performance, fluency, complexity and accuracy.The findings showed that task repetition has a beneficial effect on learners’ subsequent performance of the same task, especially on fluency and accuracy. And task repetition with corrective feedback which focused on the linguistic form has a positive effect on learners’accuracy. What’s more, the effects of task repetition with feedback can transfer to the performance of a new oral task. For example, in the study the accuracy of the learner has been improved evidently. It suggests that when the task repetition is combined with feedback, the learners will pay more attention to the linguistic form, but since the learners’attention is limited, they spare less attention for other aspects. Thus it can be concluded that task repetition in conjunction with some other treatment (such as corrective feedback) can lead learners’attention to certain aspects and such adjustment of attention will contribute to their performance of a new oral task.