A Study Of Task-Based Language Teaching And Its Application In The Teaching Of Senior English For China

As is by now well known, the term 'task' began to come into deliberate use in applied linguistics around the beginning of the 1980's. Since then, language tasks evolved from a varied collection of instructional activities in second and foreign language classrooms to a foundation for instructional planning, i.e. task-based syllabuses. Researchers are of the opinion that the term is useful, and that work on second or foreign language classrooms, syllabus design, and materials development etc. can benefit from a task-oriented perspective.In recent years, a number of researchers, syllabus designers, and educational innovators have called for a move in language teaching towards task-based approaches to instruction as they've found that TBLT has a lot of strengths. For example, it focuses on cultivating the students' ability of using language, of searching for necessary information, of cooperation, of creativity and so on. What's more, compared to form-based approaches, TBLT consists not of a sequence of preselected or preplanned language items, but of a sequence of communicative tasks to be performed in the target language.The purpose of this study is 1) To investigate the law of the basic theories and practice for TBLT in senior English teaching for China to adapt the National New Curriculum; 2) to test the hypothesis that TBLT, as a teaching approach, is more effective than the other formerly used teaching approach (namely, the five-step method in this thesis) as well as its feasibility.There are mainly six parts in this thesis.The first part is an introduction, which principally states the background and significance of this study;The second part is about a survey on problems in EFL teaching in senior middle schools in China now.The third part is a literature review of Task-based Language Teaching.The fourth part mainly talks about the application Of Task-based Language Teaching in EFL in senior middle schools.The fifth part is an experimental study to test the hypothesis of this study. The writer conducted an experimental research in two classes in Jiangxi Ningdu Normal School with around 100 students aged on average 16 over a period of eighteen weeks.