Background:

 As in our real teaching, we may come across such circumstances: students of different levels are mixed together in a large class. Many teachers complained that it is very difficult to deal with the problem. Some relatively strong students find the tasks too easy while some weak ones find the same tasks too difficult. In this situation, strong students may find no point in doing them and weak students easily get frustrated, and then just have to give up and go to sleep or keep chatting in class. As a result, all the students lose their interest in learning English and their motivation becomes lower.

   Crookes and Schmidt (1989) suggest a number of other ways in which teachers seek to foster intrinsic motivation. They try to make sure that the learning tasks pose a reasonable challenge to the students—neither too difficult nor too easy. They provide opportunities for group work. They base tasks on their perceptions of learners’ needs and wants and they try to provide for plenty of variety in classroom activities.

   Employing grading tasks is one way to enhance the students’ interest and motivation in English learning in large mix-ability classes. Grading tasks, here means that students work on the same basic activity but with different tasks graded at varying levels of difficulty (Julie Tice, 1997). Grading tasks can make students challenged at an appropriate level of difficulty and can get involved in doing the task. No one should be left behind or have nothing to do. All the students can succeed in completing the task given to them, and this is motivating them.

     From the experience that I got when I enjoyed my Teacher Training Programs in England, I tried an experiment in my real teaching to see the effectiveness of grading tasks in Chinese English learners.

  Questions:    

1)      Do grading tasks have any influence on students’ motivation and confidence in English learning?

2)      Can learners better their academic results by completing different grading tasks for a certain period of time?

Subjects

Subjects participating in the experiment were Senior One Business English majors in Li Weiqiang Vocational and Technical School. Their overall academic results before entering the vocational and technical school were not good. And their interest and confidence in learning were relatively low. Anyway, some of the students’ English was good, some was okay and some was poor.

Altogether there were 68 students in the two classes, with 33 in class Nine and 35 in Class Eight. The chosen subjects had basically the same educational background. They came from the local area and they had received three years of formal English instruction in junior high schools and two years in primary school. They were junior business English majors. There were no significant differences in terms of age, gender and over-all English proficiency, which was shown by their scores in their latest final exam. (see Table1:)

Table1: Test of the subjects’ scores in their final exam (2003.1)

Class Eight was assigned as the experimental group who had grading tasks. Class Nine was assigned as the control group who didn’t have grading tasks. The two classes were taught by the researcher. The students in these two classes used the same materials.

Materials and procedures

The study was conducted over the course of the 2002-2003 academic year from February through June. During the course, the researcher selected the materials and designed the tasks.

Different tasks were designed for different activity types (e.g. Listening, reading, vocabulary practice, etc). The following are some of ways of doing it.

1) Dictation

Selected a text to dictate to the students but gave different students a different task to do:

    Step 1: Divided the students into three groups (blue group, green group and yellow group)

    Step 2: Gave the students in the strongest group (e.g. Blue group) a blank piece of paper. Gave the middle-level group (e.g. Green group) a gapped version of the text to be dictated. Gave the low-level group (e.g. Yellow group) a complete version of the text to be dictated with multiple-choice options for some of the words or expressions.

    Step 3: Dictated the text in the normal way.

    Step 4: Got the students who did the same task to check their work with each other (i.e. blue with blue, green with green, yellow with yellow).

    Step 5: Then regrouped the students into multicolored groups, i.e. Groups of one yellow, one blue, one green student.

    Step 6: Gave students a copy of the original text to compare with or refered students to their course book if the text came from there.

2) Picture Dictation

   This was a fun activity and could be adapted to provide practice in many different lexical and structural areas. For example, the students could practise describing people, their appearance and clothes. The stronger students started with a piece of paper and had to draw the people from the scratch. The middle level students were given outlines of the people, and the weaker ones the outlines with some details filled in.

3) Vocabulary Activities

   Vocabulary plays an important role in English learning. But many students find it difficult to remember words. When some of the students see the new words, they feel tired of them or even feel a fizzy. If the teacher can let them enjoy the feeling of completing something or let them have chance to succeed, they will find some confidence in themselves and therefore enhance their interest in learning.

   As to do with vocabulary, the researcher adopted the tasks to suit different levels, for example, used the way to check the students memorizing the words: strong students (one group) wrote English with the help of the given Chinese equivalents while the weaker students wrote Chinese with the help of English. Another example is WORD SEARCH. Here is a concrete example of it : find the following words in the square (→and↓):

bed   bookshelf   mirror   television   carpet   lamp   sofa   cupboard  fridge  wardrobe  armchair   cooker   table   CD player  

   With the task, the researcher made it more difficult with higher-level students:

1.      Gave them the L1 equivalents of the words.

Or 2. Told them there were 14 things in the word square that they could find in the house.

Or 3. Told them to find as many words connected to one topic as they could and to identify the topic.

4) Reading and listening.

   Students were also given different tasks for listening and reading comprehension activities. The comprehension exercises could be designed by giving students a grid (empty or partly completed) indicating the type of information they were looking for. Or just gave the weaker students some wrong information to correct.

Results

To ensure whether there was any influence of grading tasks on students’ motivation and confidence in English learning, and whether the students could better their academic results after they had grading tasks for a period, two exams (pre-test and post test) were taken among the students in the control group and the experimental group and two surveys (with the same questionnaire on motivation and confidence) were carried out among the subjects. The following can show the results.

Tables 2:  Descriptives of scores of two tests

Table 3: Descriptives of students’ motivation and confidence in English learning

1）                   From Table 2, we can see that the students bettered their academic results after they had grading tasks for a certain period.

2）                   From Table 3, significant difference could be observed in the two surveys, the subjects became more confident and motivated in English learning after they had grading tasks for a certain period learning after they had grading tasks for a period

Conclusion and discussion:

From the experiment, advantages of using grading tasks could be seen as follows:

1) All students are challenged at an appropriate level of difficulty and can get involved in doing the task. No one should be left behind or have nothing to do.

2) All students can succeed in completing the task given to them, and this is motivating for them.

3) Different tasks could be designed for lots of different activities (e.g. listening, vocabulary practice).

4) The multicolored checking stage empowers the weaker students since they are the ones who are most likely to have a complete and correct version of the text. They are therefore in a position to help the stronger students.

5) This checking stage also promotes student co-operation and tolerance

Reference books:

Ellis, R.1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford  University Press.

Tice, J.1997. The Mixed Ability Class. Richmond Publishing.

Crookes, G. and Schmidt, R. Motivation: reopening the research agenda. University of Hawaii Working Papers in ESL (1989) 8:217-56.

秦晓晴，文秋芳，2002，“非英语专业大学生学习动机的内在结构” 载《外语教学与研究》2002年第1期。