A Study Of The Application Of TBLT To English Teaching In Rural Middle School

Task-based language Teaching (TBLT), a type of language teaching approach, was advocated in the 1980s which is on the basis of practicing from foreign language teaching researchers and second language acquisition researchers. In 2001, the State Ministry of Education worked out and issued the English Curriculum for Full-time Compulsory Education in which TBLT is the recommended foreign language teaching approach to be introduced to English teaching in China. Mostly, the subjects of this kind of studies are the students from the cities, where there are excellent teachers and well-equipped classrooms. These provide a good basis for the application of the task-based language teaching. However, there are numerous students who are living in the country side and are educated in the backward schools without qualified teachers and modern equipments. Moreover, the English teachers know little about TBLT. The author did the experimental research to check whether the task-based teaching is effective for rural middle schools. The study tries to answer the following research questions:1. Is TBLT effective in English teaching in rural middle schools?2. Can the students in rural areas accept TBLT and by what degrees?3. Does the teacher have better understanding of TBLT?With deep research into the classical theories, Willis'model for TBLT was adopted and proposed, the writer did the experiment at Grade one in Fa Haniu middle school of Xinmin County, Liaoning Province. It lasted for ten weeks, from November 2009 to January 2010 to test whether TBLT is effective in English learning in rural area. The analysis in quantitative methods will be made on the use of TBLT in English teaching in rural area by the students'scores. A questionnaire was handed out to the experimental class before and after the test to check whether TBLT has positive influence on students'attitude towards English learning. After the test, the author had an interview with the teacher who actually gave the lessons to observe her cognitive changes towards TBLT.The research findings indicate that properly designed tasks can, to some extent, improve the student'learning abilities in rural middle schools. The students after the experiment have much more interest in English learning. The author also puts forward some suggestions for teachers and sincere hope for future researches..