A Study Of Improving Junior Students' Oral Communicative Ability Through Task-Based Teaching Approach

With the increasing frequency of international exchange and rapid development of telecommunication technology and transport facilities, more and more people with high proficiency in the use of language have been urgently needed. But traditional method of English teaching paid much attention to the basic linguistic competence and ignored communicative competence. In order to solve this problem, the task-based language teaching approach is recommended in the new National English Curriculum Syllabus. The task-based language teaching approach aims at promoting communicative competence, focusing on development of learning skills and learning attributes (confidence, motivation and independence).Task-based language teaching approach, combining the advantages of both traditional and modern language teaching theories, allows students to learn and use the language by a series of interactive tasks, emphasizing on communicative activities which made the aims of study as a guide under the real situation. Students can learn, analyze, understand and use language by self-directed learning. During the learning process, the emphases are on the understanding of the meaning rather than the learning style. Learning from "doing-it" is the key to learn language. The interactive learning styles will be promoted, i.e. learning from experiencing, practicing, participating, communicating and co-operating. Students can learn language by using language, finding and solving problem, understanding language, hence sensing and experiencing the success of learning at the finishing of a task. The current research is aimed at improving junior students' oral communicative competence by using task-based teaching approach based on the cognition theory, socio-cultural theory to stimulate students' motivation for learning and promote students' self-direction, and to develop and improve creative thought and inventive consciousness of students.The author of this paper adopted the task-based language teaching approach during the process of teaching the new textbook of Grade 8: Go for it! for the first time. The author aims to improve junior students' oral communicative competence through Task-based Teaching. This paper mainly describes the background of Task-Based Teaching Approach (TBTA) which includes the rationale supporting TBTA; the definition and types of tasks and the characteristic of TBTA. Also in this paper, some main contributors to TBTA will be briefly introduced. This paper explores the reasons for the improving junior students' oral communicative competence by adopting TBTA. After the experiment, the author got the conclusion by analyzing data and teaching cases that junior students' oral communicative competence can be improved by adopting TBTA.