A Case Study Of Implementing Task-Based Language Teaching In Doctorate English Classroom

The goal of English teaching tends to improve students' communicative competence. Those with "dumb" and "deaf" English will finally become losers in the fast developing society. Thus, how to improve students' communicative competence and comprehensively promote students' language ability is of vital importance in English teaching. In recent years, a lot of scholars have conducted research of task-based language teaching in primary and middle schools. Under the guideline of New National English Curriculum Standard (2001) , task-based language teaching approach is recommended in English teaching in junior middle schools and senior high schools. Using the theory of constructivism, cognitive point of view and noticing hypothesis, the author conducts a case study of TBLT in doctorate English classroom by applying classroom observation, test, questionnaire and interview, with the aim of examining the effect of TBLT in adult students. It also seeks to identify the underlying reasons and implications of these findings in the hope of making some possible suggestions. It attempts to find answers to the following two questions:1．What is the impact of task-based language teaching on students' communicative competence?2．What is the impact of task-based language teaching on students' motivation for English learning?Through data-analysis and comparison of the results, the author of this paper comes to the following conclusions:1．After one semester's implementation of TBLT, the participants make no significant progress in their communicative competence. Lack of noticing formulaic expressions at the input stage may lead to the unidiomatic English at the output stage.2．TBLT is very effective in promoting students motivation in language learning, because various interesting tasks offer more opportunities to the learners to practice the target language.The author proposes that future classroom research should be done on the courses which implement TBLT while attaching great importance to form-focused activities designed by the teacher in pre-task phase, such as reciting formulaic expressions, which occur at the input stage so as to find whether TBLT combined with the traditional way of reading aloud and recitation is more effective in improving the students' communicative competence.