A Survey Of The Implementation Of TBLT In Middle School English Teaching In The Pearl River Delta

The term "task" came into deliberate use in applied linguistics around the beginning of the 1980's. Since then, language tasks evolved from a varied collection of instructional activities in second and foreign language classrooms to a foundation for instructional planning of TBLT. In recent years, a number of researchers, syllabus designers, and educational innovators have called for a move in language teaching towards task-based approaches. Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) is the development of Communicative Language Teaching. In TBLT, students communicate by using the target language in authentic contexts, construct language knowledge system and ultimately improving students' language proficiency by accomplish specifically tasks.Since 2001, Chinese Ministry of Education formulated The New English Curriculum Standards, which highly advocates TBLT. It is significant to explore the new theory system, which fits to our English teaching through integrating the teaching practice with TBLT theory to improve China's English teaching reform. Few investigations have been carried out in large areas to discover the practical situation of the implementation of TBLT since it was adopted in English teaching in China.The Pear River Delta is a more developed region, and the English teaching situation here is representational in China. Therefore, the author carried out a survey in this region. In the survey, five districts were sampled. In each district (except Dongguan), the author chose a key school and a general one. In these schools, 93 English teachers and 863 students were investigated. Questionnaire, observation and interview were main methods in this investigation. The data was transacted with SPSS 13. The results are:1. Basic situations of teachers and students in the Pearl River Delta: Teachers in this region come from all over China. Most of the English teachers are over 30 years old with rich experience but their teaching ideals are out of date, and they are conditioned to adopt traditional teaching methods. In general middle schools, the unbalance of students' English language proficiency causes different attitudes towards TBLT. Those who are good at English support their teachers to employ TBLT but others hold the negative attitudes. Further more, students have many chances to communicate in English because of the large amount of foreign capital corporations and corporations relate to foreign countries.2. Habits in English teaching and learning: Most of the teachers employ traditional teaching methods under the burden of the examination-oriented education system and the present evaluation system; Being seasoned with this, most of the students focus on grammar, they do not employ enough learning strategies and they often resort to negative ones. Extracurricular English activities are not abundant; some of the students do not have many opportunities to get in touch with English out of class.3. Attitude towards TBLT: most of teachers understand this approach superficially but a small part of them employ it in their class. Students accept this teaching method, but they would rather study English in a traditional way. 4. Effects of TBLT: Students are more active and the actual effect of English learning is more obviously. Most of the teachers and students affirm the positive function of TBLT on students' interest, confidence and positivity, but motivation and willpower are not easily affected; TBLT is proved the positive function on students' oral English, but their written English is in the same level as before. In general, TBLT improves students' language proficiency accordingly.5. Facts that restrict the implementation of TBLT: students' low language proficiency, the incongruity between evaluation system and TBLT, teacher's inefficient TBLT theory, the shortage of teaching resources, the current curriculum, teachers' heavy work burdens and students' superfluous homework and burdens of entering higher schools are the main factors that restrict the implementation of TBLT.The results prove that TBLT functions positively on students' interest and language proficiency, but many factors such as teacher's inefficient TBLT theory and the shortage of teaching resources curb its implementation. It was not widely used in the Pearl River Delta. Based on the results, the author proposes some pedagogical suggestions:1. While designing tasks in TBLT, six principles should be followed. They are learning by doing principle, scaffolding principle, dependency principle, authenticity principle, form-function principle and learning-applying interaction principle.2. Teaching materials should be integrated. It is necessary to codify different text books for different students. Teaching sources should be enriched and teachers should try to utilize available resources.3. Assessment methods should be ameliorated. Performance assessment should be integrated with product-oriented assessment.4. On training learning strategies, students should understand the significance of learning strategies and teachers should nurture students' strategies consciously.5. Teachers should pullulate themselves by building up an ideal of whole-life education, improving their multi-culture communication consciousness and renewing their knowledge frameworks.6. Departments of superintendence of the educational association should strongly initiate teachers to employ TBLT, afford teachers the opportunity to accept systemic training and help them improve their theoretical level as well as the capacity of applying TBLT.