A Survey Of The Implementation Of TBLT In Middle School English Teaching

Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) is the development of Communicative Language Teaching. In TBLT, students communicate by means of interactions in the target language in authentic contexts to construct language knowledge system which is the students' personal experiences contributing to classroom learning and ultimately improving students' language proficiency.Chinese Ministry of Education formulated The New English Curriculum Standards, which highly advocates TBLT. It has been in experimental implementation in China since 2001. TBLT was first developed abroad, where English is taught as a second language;while in China, English is a foreign language. There must be substantial differences between the two settings for English teaching. Consequently, it is significant to explore the new theory system which is fit to our English teaching through integrating the teaching practice with TBLT theory, for it would improve China's English teaching reform. But few investigations have been carried out in large areas to discover the practical situation of the implementation of TBLT since its beginning.Therefore, the author carried out a survey in Hunan Province. In the survey, one more developed and three less developed districts were sampled. In each district, the author chose a key school and a general one. In these schools, 96 English teachers and 905 students were investigated. Questionnaire, observation and interview were main methods in this investigation. The major findings are:1) Present situation of implementing TBLT in middle school English teaching: Most of the English teachers hold positive attitudes towards teaching, but they do not know TBLT theory systematically, which restricts its implementation. The shortage of teaching resources is another restriction for the implementation of TBLT. Classroom activities whichintegrate with tasks need to be enriched. Most teachers who still depend on traditional approaches for our evaluation follow test-driven system and are burdens with heavy work. Many students do not employ enough learning strategies and they often resort to negative ones. Extracurricular English activities are not abundant;some of the students do not have many opportunities to get in touch with English out of class.2) Effects of TBLT: Both students and teachers affirm the positive function of TBLT on students' interest, but motivation and willpower are not easily affected compared with interest;interest is the prerequisite of confidence improvement. TBLT is proved the positive function on students' written and oral English;and their oral English can be improved more than written English. TBLT improves students' language proficiency accordingly.3) Factors of restricting the implementation of TBLT: Students' low language proficiency, the incongruity between evaluation system and TBLT, teacher's inefficient TBLT theory, the shortage of teaching resources and teachers' heavy work burdens are the main factors that limit its implementation.The findings prove that TBLT functions positively on students' language proficiency, but many subjective and objective factors curb its implementation. Based on the findings, the author proposes some pedagogical suggestions:1) Teachers' theoretical level on TBLT as well as the capacity of applying TBLT to practical English teaching should be improved.2) We should enrich teaching resources for they ensure the implementation of TBLT,3) Performance assessment should be integrated with product-oriented assessment. In this way, we can evaluate students' language proficiency comprehensively.