Investigating the effect of task modality on the written and oral production of young EFL learners

What is it about?

Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) face many everyday decisions when designing and implementing their lessons. One of the decisions they need to make is what type of tasks to implement in their classes. Research on Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has investigated the effect of collaborative tasks on language development and there is a consensus that collaborative tasks that have a written component trigger more learning opportunities (operationalized as Language Related Episodes (LREs)) than tasks that involved only an oral component. LREs are segments in the dialogue in which students talk about the language they are producing, about a gramatical form, the meaning they want to express or the spelling, or pronunciation of a word. One of the explanations for why this is so is the off-line nature of written tasks when compared to the online nature of online oral tasks, which do not afford students the same opportunities for revising and correcting their production. To establish whether written or oral tasks trigger more learning opportunities is crucial information for practitioners because it allows them to make informed decisions as to what type of tasks to implement in their classes and the effect they may have on the students’ language development. The researchers designed a collaborative oral task which gave the students the opportunity to record their oral narration of a story, rewind it, listen to it again and if they saw the need to make corrections, record it again. This way, they created a context where students had the same opportunity to revise and correct their oral production, thus, providing a scenario which was very similar to that of written contexts. The participants in the study were 59 child learners of L3 English aged 10-12 from Grade 5 and Grade 6 of Primary Education. In pairs of two or three, half of the participants narrated the story orally following the procedure above and the other half narrated the story in writing. The oral and written productions were analysed in terms of LREs: how many were produced in each task; of what type they were (meaning- or form-related and spelling and pronunciation related); whether they were resolved or unresolved; whether the resolution was target-like or non-target-like; and whether the resolution of each LRE was incorporated into the final output (oral or written).

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Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash

Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The analysis of the LREs revealed that even when given the opportunity to revise and correct, more LREs were produced in the written task. The analyses also showed that the participants in Grade 5 produced more meaning-related LREs than form-related LREs and that more form-focused LREs were resolved than left unresolved in the oral task, while in the written task more meaning-focused LREs were resolved than unresolved. The 6th Graders also produced more resolved (than unresolved) meaning and form-focused LREs in the written task than in the oral task and from those resolved LREs, the participants resolved more form-focused LREs in a target-like manner in the written task than in the oral task. However, the 6th Graders also produced more non-target-like resolved form-focused LREs than the oral group. With respect to whether the LREs were incorporated in the final output, the results showed that the 5th Graders reflected more target-like meaning focused LREs in the written task but the 6th Graders were found to reflect more non-target-like resolved meaning-focused LREs than the oral group. The results obtained confirm that written tasks trigger a higher number of form and meaning-related LREs than oral tasks, even when participants are given the opportunity to revise and correct their oral production in similar ways to the written production. However, the higher number of LREs triggered by written collaborative tasks also include LREs that have been resolved in a non-target-like manner. More research is needed to examine the impact that these non-target-like LREs have on the learners’ language development. Thus, teachers should be aware that untutored oral interactions may trigger non-target-like LREs which end up incorporated in the students’ writings which suggests that learners need more guidance when carrying out unsupported collaborative tasks.

Perspectives