On Task-Based Approach And English Listening Teaching In Senior Middle School

The aim of foreign language teaching is to develop students' communicative competence, so all teaching activities should center on this principle. However, affected by the test-orientated education, the current main problem of English teaching in senior middle schools in China is that most teachers have laid more emphasis on the imparting of knowledge about English than the training of students' comprehensive abilities. Most of class hours were spent with the teacher lecturing and the students watching and listening, in conformity with the traditional method of English teaching. In such an environment the students passively learn English without ideal results, which have led to the lopsided development of students' English learning. Although quite good in written examination, they find themselves unable to communicate with native English speakers after years of English learning. As a result, such a phenomenon fails to promote the development of the modern English education in our country.Task-based teaching method, based on lots of researches done by foreign scholars, is one of the effective language teaching methods in the 1980s. The model is a new form of communicative teaching theory, aiming to turn such theory into classroom instruction. Task-based teaching method reinforces learning by studying in use and for use. So the students will learn the contents as a preparation for the task fulfillment which will come at the end and involve all the knowledge and abilities the students have just learned. Since the new secondary school curriculum was put forward by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2001, many schools have been carrying out task-based teaching reform.This paper is trying to use the method of task-based teaching model to design class-based task teaching, and then arrange the after-class homework which is task-based. At the same time, it compares an experimental class with an ordinary class for research and then makes a statistical analysis, hoping it could provide the theoretical and practical reference to the senior middle school English listening teaching under the theory of new course standards. The paper is made up of six chapters. The first chapter presents the framework and purpose of the task-based listening teaching. The second chapter gives the theoretical basis for the whole research. It describes all about the origin, development and theoretical foundation of task-basked learning teaching. The third chapter is a brief summary of the present situation of the senior English listening teaching from the aspects of the teachers, the students, the teaching materials and the teaching methods. The fourth chapter is about the experimental procedure and the assessment of students' performance. Some samples of teaching plans are also included in this part. The fifth chapter analyses and discusses the results of the experiment. The sixth chapter is a conclusion.