An Empirical Study On The Application Of Task-based Language Teaching To English Grammar Teaching In Junior High Schools

Task-based Language Teaching(TBLT)is a new teaching approach which is developed on the basis of Communicative Language Teaching.With task as a core to carry out teaching,TBLT is student-oriented and puts emphasis on learning by doing,aiming to cultivate students’ comprehensive language competence.After advocated by Chinese New English Curriculum Standard,this approach has won great popularity among English teachers or researchers in China,some of whom have made great contributions to TBLT and arrived at a series of conclusions related to TBLT.Grammar is considered to be the fundamental condition of language and the New English Curriculum Standard explicitly indicates that grammar,an essential part of linguistic knowledge,is of great significance to improve learners’ comprehensive language competence.However,it should be noted that grammar is viewed as a tricky problem by many teachers and students consistently,especially for junior high school students.Thus,Grammar teaching is ignored and inefficient.In accordance with what researchers have done on TBLT and the current problems existed in grammar teaching,this research applies TBLT into grammar teaching of junior high schools to explore its effectiveness.The author proposes two research questions:(1)What are the effects of the application of Task-based Language Teaching into English grammar teaching in junior high schools?(2)How do teachers apply Task-based Language Teaching to English grammar(3)teaching in junior high schools effectively?This research makes an empirical study.The subjects of the research involve 89 junior high school students from two parallel classes,one of which is the experimental class and the other is the control class.The experiment lasts for five months,during which the first volume of junior high school English textbook for Grade Seven by Yi Lin press is taught to students.This teaching material contains eight units and each unit costs one week to teach.The subjects’ elementary school graduation examination is regarded as the pre-test,aiming to investigate whether the two classes’ English competence is in the same level.Then,after each unit is finished,a unit-test is carried out,of which the score is recorded to see the changes of the two classes’ grammatical competence.After all the eight units are finished,students take the post-test which is also the final test.After the post-test is carried out,every student in the experimental class is required to finish a questionnaire which is designed to investigate students’ attitudes towards English grammar learning,TBLT and English learning.During the process of the experiment,the experimental class uses TBLT while the control class uses traditional 3P approach,namely presentation,practice and production.The major findings can be briefly summarized as follows: 1)TBLT can help improve students’ English grammatical competence and can stimulate students’ interest in learning English grammar.2)In order to implement TBLT in junior high schools’ English grammar teaching effectively,the author gives three suggestions.First of all,teachers are supposed to design tasks from the perspective of students’ “learning”.Moreover,teachers need to improve the quality of input by means of supplementing authentic materials and teaching in text.In addition,teachers must realize that foreign language teaching is a process of dynamic development and apply TBLT flexibly in light of students’ needs.