Understanding Teachers' Beliefs In Task-Based Language Teaching

There has been a great deal of research and theorizing in the last approximately fifteen years on the use of tasks in language teaching, particularly tasks which involve interaction between learners (e.g., Breen, 1987; Crookes, 1986; Crookes & Gass, 1993; Nunan, 1989; Prabhu, 1987). Such task-based language teaching (TBLT) is believed to promote language acquisition by providing learners with opportunities to make the language input they receive more comprehensible, furnishing contexts in which learners need to produce output that others can understand, and making the classroom closer to real-life language situations. And with the issue of The New English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education (2001), task-based teaching approach has attracted so much attention that it has become one of the most frequently employed teaching approaches in English classroom teaching.Compared with the tradition-based language teaching approach, the outstanding features of task-based teaching approach have been emphasized at the beginning of this thesis. Of all the factors, task components and the implementation of task-based language teaching are the two main issues discussed in the literature review of task-based teaching approach. Through the discussion, the description and exemplification of the various elements that go into a curriculum in which the task is the basic principle set out a procedure for integrating other elements related to the real-world language functions and the instructional sequence with basic principles.And language teaching has been described in terms of the actions and behavior teachers carry out in the classroom and the effects of such factors on the learners. In trying to understand how teachers design various classroom tasks and how they deal with all kinds of tasks they are confronted with, it is necessary to explore the beliefs and thinking processes which greatly influence teachers' classroom actions. The combination of implicit beliefs and explicit behaviors would enable us to thoroughly understand the relationship between teachers' beliefs and their classroom behaviors. Teachers' beliefs are their attitudes towards their work, their students, their subject matter, and their roles and responsibilities (Nespor, 1987). The relationship between teachers' beliefs and pedagogical behaviors varies from consistent to inconsistent.This study addresses the following aspects concerning teachers' beliefs and teaching behavior: teachers' comprehension as to classroom tasks, their performance in classroom and the correlation between their beliefs and teaching behaviors.The subjects in this study are three secondary school English teachers from C City. The main devices in this study are classroom observation and post-class interview, so this study is naturalistic in nature, and it adopted case study as the method, which can be classified into qualitative research in approach. For each case, data from classroom observations are video-taped and interviews are analyzed and summarized. The findings from the study indicate that all the subjects employ task-based teaching approach more or less in the teaching process, and they may choose different tasks for different classroom teaching contexts. These three teachers' beliefs are different to each other in some aspects, and this leads to different efficiency in their classes.In the conclusion of this study, we point out that teachers' classroom tasks are constrained by various factors when it is viewed from the perspective of teachers' beliefs and practice. This study does not intend to summarize any new models of classroom teaching, for there is no fixed pattern or best way to conduct tasks in classroom. The intention of the study is to provide some suggestions to develop and support teachers in improving their pedagogical competence, and provide valuable insights to teacher education and development programmes. On the one had, teachers should further their studies on task-based language teaching theories and make reflection on their teaching practices so as to find out the distance between their beliefs and behavior. If improving themselves through professional development and reflection on teaching quite often, teachers could then minimize or even eliminate the inconsistency between their beliefs and practices. On the other hand, from the perspective of the employers, they should provide opportunities for teachers to enrich their theoretical knowledge and adopt new ideas at regular interval.