An Experimental Research On Modified Task-based English Teaching Approach In Junior Middle Schools In China

Task-based Language Teaching, a new teaching model of the communicative approach, was developed in the 1980's. It believes that learners can acquire language effectively and develop their ability for real communication by performing various kinds of real world tasks with the help of their own perception in a student-centered class, that is to say, it focuses on learning by doing. So, it is advocated by the National New English Curriculum Standard was issued by the Ministry of Education in 2001. With the widely spread and application of Task-based Language Teaching model in China, some teachers deny the traditional 5-steps teaching method and do their teaching with a large number of real world tasks, and they do not give the students any teachers'explanation of language and grammar structural drills. Because the main theories of Task-based Language Teaching come from second language research results, but the students in China learn English as a foreign language, the learners lack enough real language materials input, it is impossible for the learners to learn the language well by their own perception. As a result of this, the effects of this kind of language teaching model are not ideal. Some students developed their listening and speaking abilities, but their reading and writing abilities are weak. Under the circumstances, I did an experiment on a new type of language teaching model that lays stress on how to develop the learners'ability for real communication as well as knowledge introduction and structural drills. In other words, it is a modified task-based teaching model. It changes the ways of language knowledge introduction and mechanical exercise (practice) in traditional 5-steps teaching method, and inherits the virtue of Task-based Language Teaching by putting real world tasks into the classroom to develop the learners' comprehensive ability to use English. This experiment aims at the following two hypotheses:one is that the Modified Task-based teaching model is effective in cultivating the students'listening and speaking as well as the Task-based Language Teaching, the other is that it can also do better in improving the students'abilities of reading,writing, and acquisition of language knowledge than the traditional 5-steps Teaching method. Firstly, I chose two classes, one of them is the experimental class and the other is a control class. Before the experiment, I analyzed the statistics from the two classes with SPSS and made a paired-samples test. The results showed that the two classes had no significant distinction. Secondly, I did an experiment in the class that used Modified Task-based approach in comparison with the other class that used traditional 5-steps teaching method. A year later, I analyzed the statistics from the two classes using the same method. The results tell us that the two classes had a big difference, which supports the above hypotheses. Based on the experiment, we can draw a conclusion that the Modified Task-based approach is more effective and efficient than the traditional 5-steps teaching method in developing the students'communicative competence.