An Action Research Approach On Task-based Teaching

In the new National English Curriculum Standards (2001), TBLT (Task-based Language Teaching) is the recommended foreign language teaching approach to be introduced to primary and secondary English education in China.An important trend in language teacher development in recent years has been a move away from the teacher as passive recipient and implementer of other people's syllabuses and methods, towards the idea of the teacher as an active creator of his or her own materials, classroom activities and so on.How teachers implement changes in pedagogy may be achieved through reflection and action research. Reflection is more than thinking and focuses on the day-to-day classroom teaching of the individual teacher as well as the institutional structures in which teacher and students work, and action research provides a way of working which links theory and practice into the whole: ideas in action.The aim of this paper is to investigate teacher's action research in task-based EFL teaching. More specifically, the study will explore four questions: 1) What is teacher's understandings and attitudes towards task-based language teaching? 2) What is the role of textbook and topics in task-based language teaching? 3) How the teacher's teaching competencies develop as doing action research on task-based instruction? 4) How about student improvement on task-based teaching?Both qualitative and quantitative data obtained from questionnaire, interview, teacher's log , examination paper and classroom observation.Although the data in the present study focuses on a case study of an English teacher in a junior school, the writer hopes it can speak to many researchers, teacher educators and practitioners who are involved in the implementation of task-based teaching and willing to do action research in a variety of contexts.