A Study Of The Effects Of Task Type And Proficiency Pairing On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

With the continuous development of English education and the reform process of the college entrance examination,the types of English writing have become more diverse,and how senior high school students actually perform in different writing tasks has attracted some attention,but the research is not deep enough.The curriculum standards have emphasized that teachers should create opportunities for students to learn cooperatively in teaching activities to promote the effective implementation of cooperative learning.However,many English teachers still use the grouping principle of proximity but fail to consider more scientific and effective ways of grouping.Thus,there is also much room for research on how to maximize the benefits of cooperative learning to promote writing effectiveness.In view of this,there is a need to investigate the effects of task type and proficiency pairing on senior high school students’ English writing in response to the reform and the current situation of English writing instruction.Using the interaction hypothesis,the limited-capacity model of attention,and the zone of proximal development as the theoretical basis,the author selected 68 subjects from two classes of 102 Grade-2 students of a senior high school in Jiangmen City,Guangdong Province,to perform proficiency pairing and complete two writing tasks to investigate two questions: 1)What effects do task type and proficiency pairing have on senior high school students’ overall performance in English writing? 2)What effects do task type and proficiency pairing have on the linguistic accuracy,complexity,and fluency of senior high school students’ English writing?The results show that:(1)There is no significant effect of task type on senior high school students’ overall performance in English writing,but there is a significant effect of proficiency pairing on senior high school students’ overall performance in English writing(p= 0.000),with the high-low group scoring significantly higher in writing than the medium-medium group.There is an interactive effect of task type and proficiency pairing on senior high school students’ overall performance in English writing(p = 0.047),and the medium-medium group achieve significantly higher scores in practical writing than in the continuation task.(2)Three aspects are to be illustrated: 1)There is a significant effect of different task types on the indicator of total number of dependent clauses(DC)/ total number of clauses(C)in the linguistic complexity of senior high school students’ English writing(p =0.003),but there is no significant difference in terms of linguistic accuracy and fluency;2)There is a significant effect of proficiency pairing on the indicators of error-free total number of T units(EFT)/ total number of T units(T),and total number of errors(E)/ total number of T units(T)in linguistic accuracy of English writing for senior high school students(p = 0.001 for the former;p = 0.002 for the latter),but there is no significant difference in terms of linguistic complexity and fluency;3)The interactive effect of task type and proficiency pairing reaches a significant level for the DC/C indicator of language complexity(p = 0.022),with significantly higher C/T indicators in the medium-medium group than in the high-low group when the task type is the continuation task,while there is no interactive on the other indicators.Based on the findings,two teaching suggestions are proposed: 1)using different task types to improve students’ ability to master complex sentences in a targeted way;2)adopting reasonable proficiency pairing and making full use of cooperative writing to improve students’ writing accuracy in a targeted way.