The Effect Of Group Work Task Types On Senior One Students’ Learner Engagement In English Classes

Aiming at cultivating students’ English core competences,The new English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School advocates views of English learning activities and learning methods such as autonomous learning,cooperative learning,and inquiry learning.Peer interaction,as an indispensable way of cooperative learning,has been widely used in senior high school English classes in China.But it is arguable whether peer interaction really strengthens students’ English development.In fact,the effectiveness of peer interaction is affected by a variety of factors such as English proficiency,peer familiarity and task etc.,among which task type is a powerful one.In order to investigate the effect of task types in group work on Senior One students’ learner engagement that has been proven to positively affect English learning,the present study adopts the taxonomy put forward by Philp and Duchesne(2016)that learner engagement is comprised of behavioral,cognitive,social,and emotional aspects.The independent variables are the frequently-used group work task types in Senior One English classes and the dependent variable is learner engagement at four dimensions.This thesis attempts to answer the following questions:1)What kind of task types of group work are often employed in Senior One English classes?2)What is the effect of the above identified task types on students behavioral,cognitive,social,and emotional engagement respectively?First of all,English classroom observation lasting one month is conducted in 8parallel classes randomly chosen from 18 parallel Senior One classes in The High School Affiliated to YNNU to investigate the frequently-used task types in group work in English classes.The eight classes are taught by eight different English teachers.The results of classroom observation show that discussion task based on text which features convergent goal and topic discussion task that pursues divergent outcome are most frequently used in English classes observed.Except that,peer evaluation task in writing is regularly applied in the Senior One English classes.Thus,the three sorts of tasks are chosen as independent variable in this study.After that,4 groups of four are chosen from 2 parallel classes respectively,which are taught by the same English teacher,to analyze their learner engagement in different group work task types.According to the results of classroom observation,all the eight groups have finished three kinds of tasks in group work(discussion task based on text,topic discussion task,peer evaluation task in writing)with two different topics.The process of students’ peer interaction is recorded,transcribed,and then quantitatively analyzed in terms of different measurements of students’ behavioral,cognitive,and social engagement,including “time on task” and “turns”(behavioral engagement),“negotiation of meaning”,“language-related episodes,” as well as “interactional language functions”(cognitive engagement),“collaborative sentence completion” and “backchannels”(social engagement).After completing each interaction-oriented task,the group members are required to participate in a questionnaire survey to investigate students’ emotional engagement.A semi-structured interview is also conducted to explore students’ emotional perception of different task types at the end of this research.Data and information obtained are analyzed by means of repeated measures analysis of variance(ANOVA)and multiple comparison in SPSS.The results manifest that task types do exert significant influence on learners’ behavioral,cognitive,and emotional engagement while their social engagement is less affected by task types.Specifically speaking,firstly,students produce more turn-taking and spend much more time completing peer evaluation task in writing while they least behaviorally invested in discussion task based on text.Secondly,as for cognitive engagement,students engender more negotiation of meaning and language-related episodes in peer evaluation task in writing than in topic discussion task and discussion task based on text but in view of interactional language functions,more interactional language like expressing agreement or disagreement and expanding opinions emerges in topic discussion task than in peer evaluation task in writing.Thirdly,with respect to emotional engagement,the results from both questionnaire and semi-structured interview elaborate that learner emotional engagement(including attitude toward task,judgement about task,perception of task completion process,attitude toward peers and peer interaction)reaches the highest level while performing peer evaluation task in writing,while topic discussion task and discussion task based on text rank the second and the third.But significant differences are found only in attitude toward task and judgement about task.In short,peer evaluation task in writing,which is preferred by most participants,leads to more amount of talk,and motivates learners to focus on linguistic forms,and gratifies their desire to improve English learning,but is more deficient in promoting interaction than topic discussion task.In the light of above research conclusions,this study attempts to provide some pedagogical implications,such as strengthening interaction awareness,making interactive strategies more explicit and taking group construction into exhaustive consideration.