Application Of Task-based Teaching To Junior-Three Students' Oral English Training

Language is the most important communicative tool of human beings. The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to cultivate students' communicative ability in speaking and writing in English. But for a long time, the rigid evaluation system conditioned Chinese middle-school students to treat English just as an expedient to pass exams, so they have had no time, no energy, even no motivation or interest in practicing spoken English. At the same time, many middle school teachers haven't really understood the characteristics and importance of CLT. They are still focusing their attention mainly on students' mastery of grammar and vocabulary, and giving class instructions in Chinese. As a result, Chinese learners' speaking ability is largely not very proficient.Based on analyses of middle-school students' lack of proficiency in spoken English, I have formed a hypothesis: it is possible to improve students' speaking ability by introducing task-based teaching into classrooms dominated by traditional teaching methods. As a development of CLT, TBT was introduced in the 1980s. It emphasizes "learning by doing". It starts out from students' interest and personal experience and attaches importance to students' level of cognitive development while having them fulfill various real-life or study tasks by way of direct communication in English so as to develop their ability in using the language they are learning.To prove the validity of this hypothesis, the author researched into the application of task-based teaching to junior students' oral English teaching employing such methods as experiment, investigation, data analysis and document search, etc. This thesis expounds the nature, content, theoretical ground, the necessity and advantages of task-based teaching. And the author also set forth some innovative ideas as to how to design tasks and organize class activities, derived from her own teaching experience, and put those ideas into practice among students of a selected class known as the control class. After a year's experiment, the final results indicate that students' English speaking fluency has improved considerably. This proves that task-based teaching is in keeping with the fundamental law of language acquisition, and is more likely to arouse students' enthusiasm to learn, for it provides ample opportunities for students to learn by doing, which motivates students to use the language eagerly so that they develop their ability of language use in the course of fulfilling tasks.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first one is introduction, which pins down the problems existing in spoken English classes at Junior 3 of middle schools and presents the hypothesis of improving spoken English classes via task-based teaching. The second chapter is a survey of literature, which clarifies the theoretical grounds and major features of task-based teaching, together with some theory-related issues worth examining that may arise when the task-based teaching mode is applied to spoken English classes. Chapter Three is a brief account of research methodology, which lists the subjects, instruments and procedures of investigation as well as the objects and methods of the teaching innovation. The fourth chapter comprises results and analysis, which conducts a detailed analysis of the statistics collected before it leads to the aforesaid conclusion. Chapter Five is the concluding part of the thesis. It puts forward a number of suggestions as to how to organize spoken-English classes at Junior 3 of middle schools based on implications for teaching drawn from this experiment. Finally the author points out that, as the research shows less improvement in students' spoken-English accuracy as opposed to fluency, further research work is called for in the area of how to improve students' spoken-English accuracy by designing desirable types of tasks. In this way, the current research makes clear the direction of future research work related to this specific issue.