Effects Of Task Repetition On Fluency And Accuracy Of Senior High School Students’ Oral Performances

The ultimate goal of English teaching is to cultivate students’ ability to use language to communicate appropriately.The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017)also call for the necessity to focus on cultivating high school students’ interpersonal communication skills.It can be seen that the cultivation of oral communication ability is an indispensable part of English teaching.However,according to the current situation of oral English teaching in senior high schools,students’ oral ability is not proportional to their written ability,and the cultivation of their oral ability is far from meeting the requirements of the curriculum standards.It’s known that the ideal goal of oral teaching is to cultivate the fluency and accuracy of students’ oral communicative competence.Fluency is based on meaning,while accuracy is based on form.They are inseparable and competitive with each other.So how to effectively improve learners’ communicative competence and make language form and meaning more balanced is the key to oral teaching.Therefore,this study attempts to apply task repetition to the teaching of oral English in senior high schools and tries to explore the effects of task repetition on accuracy and fluency of high school students’ oral performances.In this study,110 students were selected from two parallel classes in a senior high school from a city of central China and 60 of them formed two groups as the high-level and low-level groups according to their final grades.The specific research questions are as follows to be answered:(1)What are the effects of task repetition on fluency of senior high school students’ oral production?(2)What are the effects of task repetition on accuracy of senior high school students’ oral production?(3)Are there any different effects of task repetition on fluency and accuracy of senior high school students’ oral production at different levels,if any,what are the effects?In this study,SPSS23.0 software was used to collect the data.The experimental oral output results were measured according to the dimensions of fluency and accuracy.After the experiment,six participants were randomly selected to conduct interviews as a supplement to the quantitative data.Descriptive analysis and analysis of variance were carried out and the following conclusions are drawn: firstly,task repetition can improve fluency and accuracy of students’ oral output greatly.Secondly,for one thing,task repetition has a significant positive effect on oral fluency for both high-level and low-level groups.For another,there is a significant interaction between English proficiency and task repetition in learners’ oral accuracy.Task repetition does not promote the accuracy of the high-level group,but significantly improves the accuracy of the low-level group.Besides,the study also found that the the two groups have different optimal repetitions.The implications of the above conclusions for oral English teaching are: English teachers should recognize the positive transferring effect of task repetition,and make full use of it to promote students’ oral ability.Learners of different English levels should be taught following their aptitude.Teachers could find the optimal repetitions for learners to reach their best performance,and design tasks suitable for different learners.