Principles Of Designing Task-Based Activities In High School

In 1980s,the task-based language teaching, based on communicative language teaching, came into being. This kind of teaching is characterized by classroom activities which must be designed according to certain principles to focus on completing tasks so as to ensure learners' acquirement of the ability of communication. This thesis attempts to make a tentative study on the principles of task-based classroom activities in terms of communication, authenticity and humanization. The communication principle refers to the interaction of information and the combination of language forms with the language functions. The authenticity principle emphasizes that both the teaching tasks and the comprehension to the tasks are authentic. For the authenticity principle, firstly, classroom activities designed should follow the application criterion, meaning that classroom activities must be close to the real world as possible. It also means that these activities designed should be such as the real life and situation of the students, and clear in objective, inclusive in feedback and evaluation and scientific in arrangement of the tasks. In addition, these activities designed should be colorful and suitable to the taste of different students and aimed at the cultivation of the overall ability of the students. Moreover, the authenticity principle also means students accurate comprehension of the tasks in light of specific context, including linguistic and non-linguistic contexts; difficulty and how difficult the activities designed are another important factor that will affect learners understanding the text. The humanization principle means that foreign language teaching must center on "man". Through the good design of the activities by creating a psychologically secure environment and a good atmosphere, the activities designed should be success-oriented, and capable of arousing curiosity of the learners in order that the student can obtain self-respect through success, and go on with their studies as prompted by their strong interest in learning and know how to put what they have learned into practice according to the students. All the above three principles are theones that should be observed in the design of the classroom activities. And it is believed that only by following these three principles, can we produce most scientific and better classroom activities that fit better our high school English teaching. As further stated in the paper, the classroom activities designed by the author according to these three principles are somewhat time-consuming and effort-consuming, however, they are worthwhile as the experiment shows that the English level of the students has been raised after they are taught through task-based activities. This fact demonstrates that the three principles are workable in practice and that task-based activities, when conducted well in English teaching and learning, can hopefully improve greatly our teaching and enable students to attain the communicative objectives of the curriculum.