Developing Rural Senior Middle School Students' Speaking Ability By Task-Based Language Teaching

Traditionally our focus in the English teaching is always on knowledge but not performance. Students can't apply the knowledge to real life. So after many years' English study, they still experience difficulty in using English aurally and orally. With the spreading in China of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), today our focus is on communication. We emphasize that the student is the subject of learning; that the end of the English language learning is communicating in English or doing things in English; the impetus of learning is information exchanging. Great changes have taken place in China's English teaching field, and more focus is on developing students speaking ability. Most students' speaking ability has improved a lot, and some of them have even reached the native-like level. But as a whole, Chinese students' English speaking level can still not meet the needs of the increasingly changing society. In the rural areas, because of late starting age, limited teaching facilities, little exposure to idiomatic English, less satisfactory teachers' quality, especially their out-of-date teaching ideas, inflexible teaching methods and monotonous assessment measures, rural students' motivation of learning English is, as a whole, weaker than that of city students. After six years' English study, what they have grasped is, so to speak, "deaf and dumb" English.This thesis analyzes the present situation of "speaking" in senior middle schools of our country and, based on the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis (Krashen, 1982), the Input and Interaction Hypothesis (Ellis, 1999), and Task-Based Language Teaching, puts forward a speaking-activating mode. That is: Prompting speaking by listening and reading; driving output with sufficient input; facilitating teaching through...