Application Of "Task-based Approach" To The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension

Although CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) has been practised for many years by the English teachers in China, some surveys show that very traditional ways of teaching listening in classrooms in China are easy to find. In the traditional class, the listening teaching is conducted in a fixed mode: explanation of new words, listening, doing exercises, and then checking of answers. According to Sheerin (1987), this traditional English listening class is not teaching listening but testing listening. New English Curriculum Standard explicitly advocates the application of task-based language teaching (or task-based learning) in Chinese middle school to develop students' comprehensive abilities of using a language. The study was undertaken to find out whether the implementation of TBLT in listening classes is effective to improve students' English level, excitated the students' interest in learning English, and students grasp some listening strategies.This thesis consists of seven parts: Part One starts with a brief introduction to the research orientation and reasons for this study. In Part Two, literature review, the author reviews the task-based language teaching and its previous researches abroad and at home as well as main researches of application of task-based teaching in listening comprehension teaching abroad and in China. The third part introduces two theories (psycholinguistic perspective and socio-cultural theory), which can account for task-based language use and learning, both theoretical approaches afford useful insights into the task-based language pedagogy. Part Four is the part of experimental study, it presents a detailed description of the way the proposed study is conducted. The author first advances three hypotheses, and then provides some related information concerning the subjects, duration of the experiment, experimental material and the procedures of experiment. At the beginning of the experiment, to assure the comparability of the two groups, we had a survey on students' interest and attitude towards learning English and two tests on overall English level and listening comprehension level. T-test and P-value show that there's no significant difference between two groups before the experiment. During the process of the twenty-week experiment, two different teaching methods were applied to the listening comprehension classes, namely, EG is instructed with task-based approach, while CG is done with traditional method. At the end of the experiment, post-tests on overall English level and listening comprehension level and the survey on students' interest and attitude towards learning English as well as the questionnaire survey on listening comprehension strategy were carried out and the results of theexperiment are listed in Part Five, that is, Data collection and analysis. The related data and the results which contain post-tests and the questionnaire surveys on learners' interest and attitude on learning English and listening comprehension strategy were listed and analyzed, and the results justified the author's hypotheses and the conclusion was drawn that the application of task-based language teaching to listening comprehension teaching in middle school can improve the students' English level and excitated the students' interest in learning English as well as help students use some listening comprehension strategies unconsciously. Part six is the results and discussion. In this part, the author reviews the major findings in the experiment, practical implications and the recommendation for future research. Part seven is the thesis' conclusion.