A Study On The Relationship Between Task-Based Language Teaching And Motivation

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is a pedagogical innovation beginning to find its application in second language (L2) teaching in the 1980's and aiming at enabling L2 learners to learn the target language through the completion of tasks. The study of tasks has helped bring together the study of second language acquisition (SLA) and language pedagogy. In China, the study of task-based language teaching is only in the initial stage, and most researches are focused on the introduction of TBLT. Although motivation is one of the important affect factors that influence individual learning, no study in China is focused on the relationship between TBLT and motivation; few studies are concerned about the feasibility of TBLT in college context So study on the relationship between TBLT and motivation and the feasibility of TBLT in college context is very important.The objective of the research is: (1) to investigate the motivation of college non-English majors and their learning problems; (2) to explore the relationship between TBLT and motivation as well as the feasibility of TBLT at college level The participants involved in this study are 90 freshmen majoring in Psychology and Chinese at Jinan University. Psychology majors were chosen as the experimental class in which task-based language teaching approach was implemented and Chinese majors were appointed as the control class in which traditional teaching method was used. Data were collected through a questionnaire the author designed on the basis of Gardener's. Attitude/Motivation Test Battery or AMTB (Gardner 1985) The questionnaire is composed of five subscales including learners' attitudes toward English, learning goal orientations, motivational intensity, causal attribution and classroom anxiety. Data were analysed by using SPSS 11.5 and adopting independent-sample t-test.Due to lack of task-based college English textbooks, principles on how to adapt non-task-based materials to task-based framework are discussed based on Nunan's and Willis' principles of task designing.