The Effect Of Task Types And Language Proficiency On Senior High School Students’ Engagement

In virtue of task-based language teaching(TBLT),the present study is to explore the effects of task types and language proficiency on learner engagement in senior high school from the sociocognitive perspective.This study will use the conceptual framework put forward by Philp & Duchesne(2016)that learner engagement is a multidimensional construct that includes cognitive,behavioral,social,and emotional dimensions of engagement.This study is a 2x2 hybrid experimental design.The independent variables are two types of task(closed task and open task)and two levels of language proficiency(low-level proficiency and high-level proficiency).In the present study,the task type is the within-group variable and the language proficiency is the between-group variable.The dependent variable is learner engagement,including learner behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement,social engagement and emotional engagement.This study explores the effect of task types and language proficiency on learner engagement in various dimensions.The participants are 32 senior high school students including 16 high proficiency level and 16 low proficiency level.The 16 low proficiency learners are from a parallel class while the 16 high proficiency learners are from a key class.They form eight high-level groups and eight low-level groups by themselves and each of groups is required to complete a closed task,namely jigsaw task,and an open task,namely free discussion task in this research.The whole process is recorded using mobile phones.After they performed the task,semi-structured interviews are conducted on eight students.The researcher transcribes the recordings,codes them with the software NVIVO according to the relevant indicators of each dimension of learner engagement,and conducts mixed-design variance analysis with SPSS 22 software.Here are the results:First of all,task types have significant influence on learners’ behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement and emotional engagement,while learners’ social engagement is less affected by task types.Specifically,task types had significant effects on learners’ time investment,number of turns(behavioral engagement),and meaning negotiation and language-related episodes(cognitive engagement),while there were almost no significant differences in collaborative sentence completion and backchannels(social engagement).Secondly,language proficiency has a significant impact on learners’ engagement.Specifically,high-level learners are more behaviorally,cognitively and emotionally engaged than low-level learners.Finally,task types and language levels interact in terms of time on task,negotiation of meaning,and language-related episodes.This study provides some implications for senior high school English teachers to enrich the types of oral tasks in English class and select appropriate tasks according to teaching objectives and students’ language proficiency level.The results of this study show that the closed task is more beneficial to learners’ cognitive engagement.Therefore,teachers can make use of this feature to cultivate students’ interactive discourse strategies,improve learners’ cognitive engagement,and improve their ability to use languages.In addition,teachers should enrich the types and forms of tasks in class,arouse students’ interest,and promote students’ emotional engagement in the task process.