A Case Study Of Tasks In High School English Exemplary Lessons From The View Of Authenticity

As the focus of education is gradually shifted towards the development of students’ core competencies,learning process is catching more and more attention.The learning process which can significantly help students achieve the core competencies should be deep learning.As mentioned in Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 version,2020 revised),task design requires teachers to set up authentic context and organize learning tasks at different levels by means of various tools to help students achieve deep learning.The best way to assess whether students have achieved core competencies is to ask them to “do things”,and “do things” must be under an authentic context.Therefore,it is significant to study the task authenticity in classes.In addition,Lu’s classroom teaching evaluation scale shows that when evaluating the authenticity of tasks,teacher-talk in tasks can be one of the evaluation factors for task authenticity except for the task design.Besides,teacher-talk can closely related to the interaction between teacher and students and it is also one of the factors that teachers can control and improve.Based on the above,this thesis investigates tasks in high school English exemplary lessons from the view of authenticity.Three questions are researched:(1)What is the authenticity of task design in these High School English Exemplary Lessons?(2)What is the authenticity of teacher-talk used in conducting these tasks in these exemplary lessons?(3)What is the authenticity of each exemplary lessons?An observation approach was used to conduct the study.A total of 12 high school English exemplary lessons were observed in this study.Four data collection scales were used to collect the data of tasks design and the teacher-talk in the tasks.The results showed that it is more authentic in the design of application tasks than learning tasks and the main reasons for the lack of authenticity are lacking“situational authenticity” and “interactional authenticity”.There is also a lack of authenticity in the aspect of situational authenticity,linguistic authenticity and content authenticity in teacher-talk in these tasks.It is difficult for students to demonstrate real language skills and pursue deep learning during those inauthentic tasks.The average rank of the twelve lessons is “good”.The main reasons for the lack of authenticity in each lesson are that some of the teaching tasks were not carried out around the real application purpose of the authentic application tasks or the task didn’t conform to the teaching contents as well as the real purpose of authentic application tasks.Therefore,it is high time for English teachers to pay more attention to authentic tasks design and teacher-talk.It can make great effects in the process of promoting students’ deep learning and developing core competencies.