Application Of Task-based Approach In Junior Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary teaching is an integral part of foreign language teaching. The successful and effective vocabulary teaching has close relation with the completion of the teaching aims. Nevertheless, vocabulary teaching is time-consuming but poorly efficient in my school. More and more English teachers found that although beginners (especially for primary school students and the first or second year junior students) may spell many words and idioms, or they may read the dialogue or a short passage, they can't understand the Chinese meaning of the words or a passage and cannot use them appropriately, which usually result in pragmatic failure in communication. Scholars or teachers began to pay attention to the research of vocabulary teaching with the developing of the teaching reforms: Scholars or teachers both at home and abroad have already made a lot of research into English vocabulary teaching, and they have also published quite a number of essays on vocabulary teaching or on vocabulary learning. As for how to teach vocabulary efficiently, different people will have different attitudes and different methods. But these methods are mostly aimed at learners who have learned some English before, and for the beginners who have poor foundations and poor conditions in the rural area, these methods may not fit them. It is exciting for us that in recent years, the study of task-based language learning and teaching has received more and more concern. Learners in task-based language teaching are provided with lots of opportunities to join in the language learning activities which are designed to engage learners in the practical use of the language. But most of them attempt to probe task-based learning in the four skills of language learning (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). However, little has been done to investigate the task-based approach in vocabulary teaching, especially for junior students.This thesis hypothesizes that task-based vocabulary teaching can improve the students'interest in learning; make students have deep impressions of the basic meanings of words; improve their communicative ability of using vocabulary. The new curriculum criteria have set a much higher standard for junior students in their vocabulary. And in conventional approaches, English vocabulary learning frustrates many students as a tedious toil to be endured, which makes students memorize English words in isolation without linking the vocabulary teaching with the development of the students' linguistic competence. Task-based English vocabulary teaching provides a meaningful context for vocabulary "acquisition", which facilitates the students' intake process.This thesis attempted to investigate to what extent Task-based approach was effective than the conventional way in vocabulary teaching of English as a foreign language for junior students who didn't learn English in primary school as well as whether the participants like the tasks in the task-based approach or not. The subjects of this study are the students (ordinary Junior One students) of the vocational school in Qingshuihe, Huhhot. It involved 97 students of Junior One. The 97 subjects consist of two groups. 48 were in the experimental group, and the other 49 were in the control group. And all the data and information of the investigation were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively by employing SPSS13.0.The findings of this research prove that the advantages of task-based approach in vocabulary teaching are evident: it will impress the students deeply when they first meet the words, and they will remember the word meaning easily. And the questionnaire investigation shows that most of the students like the tasks in the vocabulary learning; they think the activities of finishing the task make it much more interesting and easier to remember the word meaning. However it may have disadvantage in the process, so we need further study to improve it.