Designing Tasks For Junior Students-An Action Research Project

This thesis mainly focuses on designing tasks for Junior One students in Chongwen District, Beijing, China. First of all, the thesis describes the background ofTask-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), which includes the rationale supporting TBLT; the definition and types of tasks and the characteristics of TBLT. In this part, some main contributors to TBLT will be briefly introduced. Secondly, it explores the significance of TBLT and the reasons for designing tasks for Junior One students in Beijing, China, explaining why TBLT is useful in today's foreign language teaching for teenagers in China. The main English teaching problems of Chongwen District will be described in this part. And two young cooperators and their students involved in the research will be introduced briefly, too. Thirdly it will present the identification of two problems: students have little or no interest in English learning and teachers follow the traditional, teacher-centered ways of English teaching. Fourthly it describes the implementation of an action research on task-based teaching practice, which includes preliminary investigation about the two young English teachers and their students, planning actions of twelve weeks, the researcher and the two cooperators design one task for each week, data collection through questionnaires, teaching log, classroom observation and interviews with students. Fifthly the results and analysis of the action research will be found in this part. And the results and analysis will be presented weekly according to the twelve weeks action plan. Through the actionresearch on TBLT, it is concluded that TBLT can stimulate students' interest of learning English and can change the teacher-centered classroom into a student-centered one. Finally, it presents the work that has been done for developing tasks for Junior One students in Beijing, China (Students' Book One A). The tasks are designed based on the results of the action research project, following the general principles of TBLT. And the questionnaire is to be found in the appendix.