Employing The Task-based Learning Approach To Develop Junior School Students' Learning Motivation In English

At present, with the reform of New English Curriculum Standards, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is implemented in different areas in China. Because of a great change in the current curriculum, in which students learning interest, attitudes and feelings have become increasingly assessable to the classroom foreign language teaching and learning, it calls for more theory-oriented and up-dated instructional techniques for teachers to stimulate the students' motivation to learn and to help students learn effeciently. And furthermore it calls for the teachers to lay emphasis on students direct experiences. The purpose of the study was to see the effectiveness of TBLT to prove whether TBLT teaching approach can improve junior school students' learning motivation or not.According to the Input Hypothesis by Kranshen, the Interaction Hypothesis by Long and Dickinson, Constructivism Theory by William and Burden, the author used TBLT framework raised by Willis, the steps are as following:1 Pre-task mainly introduces topic and tasks, emphasizes tasks, introduces relevant background knowledge.2 Task-cycle includes planning, preparation, while-task and report of tasks3 Language focus includes analysis and practice of tasks, helps students consolidate language.The experiment lasted for four months , the author used TBLT and traditional teaching methods in two classes of grade two .The questionnaire on the learning motivation, the interview and the learning achievements were presented, and SPSS processed all the data obtained, it was concluded that:1) TBLT can help students improve their learning motivation effectively.2) TBLT can be effective in junior English teaching.3) TBLT can change teacher-centered class into student-centered class.The thesis is made up of seven parts: introduction, literature review, theoretical framework, research, results and discussion, and the conclusion. The first part is introduction, it mainly introduces the present situation of English teaching in China and the existing problems. This thesis aims at illustrating the employment of the TBLT for improving junior school students' learning motivation. Part 4 and 5 are the main parts, which contain all the research procedure: hypotheses, instruments, data collection, statistical analysis, discussion and so on. The last part is conclusion. It emphasizes the limitation of the research and gives some advices for the future research in this field. Our belief is that once the teachers develop junior students' learning motivation by employing TBLT, the students' learning proficiency can be gradually improved.