The Interaction of Topic Choice and Task-Type in the Japanese High School EFL Classroom

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520600
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Foreign language education
• Research Institution: Otaru University of Commerce
• Principal Investigator: Thurman John 小樽商科大学, 言語センター, 教授 (90432583)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: TBLT / motivation / accuracy / complexity / fluency / choice / high school / japan

Outline of Final Research Achievements

For this research, I studied the interaction of motivation (Task Interest and Task Self-efficacy) and oral conversation output (Accuracy, Complexity, Fluency) with the level of tasks topic choice a students has. For this research, I collected data at a high school in Sapporo, Hokkaido using two different types of tasks; descriptive and narrative with two different level of choice; where the student does the task topic decided by the teacher (No Choice) and where the student can choose from amongst three different topic of the same kind of task (Limited Choice).
The after-task survey data results for the motivation of the students to conduct the task, showed no significant differences between the levels of choice, although the limited level was somewhat greater. Oral output data showed greater syntactic Complexity for the Limited Choice (descriptive) task and greater lexical complexity for the Limited Choice (narrative) task. There was also greater Fluency for the descriptive task.

Free Research Field

motivation, task-based language teaching