Study On The Effects Of Mindmap-based Oral Tasks On Oral Production In SLA

Learners’ poor ability of oral production has always been the shortcoming of foreign language education in China.Some problems are found:in the content of output or language fluency.Hence,improving the effectiveness of spoken English teaching is necessary and urgent.To date,the correlation between development of oral proficiency and task types in foreign language teaching has attracted an increasing attention of researchers.The task factor has become an important research perspective.Different types of tasks in foreign language learning bear different cognitive load.Reduc:ing the total amount of cognitive load is helpful to the improvement of learning effectiveness.According to cognitive load theory,learners’ cognitive load will be affected by the features of learning materials,task structures,the presentation of tasks,and so forth.Therefore,cognitive load that impedes learning should be reduced to the greatest extent.Meanwhile,learners should make full use of limited cognitive resources so as to achieve better learning effect.Mind maps,as one of the visual representations of knowledge visualization,accord with human’s schematic thinking and will effectively reduce the overall cognitive load.It has been investigated in the vast majority of domestic studies on its application in foreign language teaching,namely vocabulary,reading,writing,and grammar.Nevertheless,few domestic studies,in particular contrastive studies in which the mind map is designed as a task,are conducted.Hence,based on knowledge visualization and cognitive load theory,the present study aims to explore the effects of mindmap-based oral tasks on oral production by measuring three dimensions,namely language complexity,accuracy,and fluency.Language complexity mainly covers syntactic complexity and lexical complexity,which is to be calculated and analyzed by Web-based Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and Lexical Complexity Analyzer.The measurement of language accuracy is mainly based on ratio of the number of T-unit without grammatical errors to the total number of T-unit,while language fluency is measured by speaking rate,breakdown and repair.Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches are adopted in the present study.60 freshmen of non-English majors from a university of Guangxi province are chosen as subjects and required to accomplish two oral tasks within the given time.The independent variables are two types of oral tasks,namely the question-based oral task and the mindmap-based oral task,while the dependent variable is oral production that participants generate in two oral tests.Two research questions are proposed in this study.1)Compared with question-based oral tasks,what are the effects of mindmap-based oral tasks on oral production?2)What are participants’perceptions of the mindmap-based oral task?The major findings are manifested as follows.(1)The mindmap-based oral task produces obvious positive effects on syntactic complexity,in particular the length of oral production,syntactic structure,amount of coordination,amount of subordination,and complex T-unit ratio.They significantly increase in comparison to the question-based oral task.It produces small positive influence on the number of different words in terms of lexical complexity.(2)No obvious limprovement in language accuracy can be found in the comparison between the mindmap-based oral task and the question-based oral task.(3)The mindmap-basecd-oral task produces positive impact on the language fluency,with the improvement of speaking rate,the decrease of both breakdown and repair.(4)The majority of participants show great interests in the mindmap-based oral task and positive attitudes towards it.Most of them look forward to applying mindmap-based oral tasks in the learning of spoken English.However,the usage of mindmap-based oral task is inadequate and expected to be improved.Hence,teachers should strengthen learners’awareness and knowledge about how to effective use mind maps in spoken English teaching,enlarge the application of mindmap-based oral tasks,reduce learners’overall cognitive load in the process of tasks performance,and improve the effectiveness of spoken English training.