The Impact Of Task-based Language Teaching On Junior Middle School English Learner's Motivation

As we all know, motivation essentially happens whenever students feel involved, stimulated, and challenged by social-linguistic-based tasks. And task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), taking the learners' desire of accomplishing some specific tasks as the motivation of their further language learning, offers students such a chance. Compared to other teaching approaches, task-based language teaching approach seems to have the most potential to arouse learners' interests in study and increase their motivation. However, the evidence of such a conclusion is uncertain since TBLT is taking shape in the background of teaching English as the second language. Therefore, the impact of TBLT on learner's motivation in our country still needs to be examined. Enlightened by researches of TBLT and motivational theories, the author of the thesis carried out a term-long teaching experiment based on TBLT approach among a group of Junior Two students in Da Tong, ShanXi Province. Simultaneously, a control group that had traditional PPP method was taken as a contrast. The aim of the study is to use quantitative methods to verify whether a TBLT program can influence students' evaluation on the English course, whether it can increase their language learning motivation and to what extent it can decrease their anxiety in study. And the results of this study showed that TBLT is more effective in proving such hypothesis.Chapter 1 introduces the relationship between language learning and motivation, and the background. Chapter 2 and 3 review the theories related to motivation and TBLT. Chapter 4 and 5 report an experimental study and its results, which are analyzed by quantitative analysis. Finally, chapter 6 concludes the thesis and presents the limitations.