An Investigation On The Application Of Task - Based Teaching In Senior English Class

The new English curriculum standard puts forward explicitly:"The goal of English Teaching in basic education is to advocate the task-based language teaching in English class which needs the teachers to develop the students’comprehensive ability through participation, experience, personal practice, independent thinking and cooperative inquiry. Under the guidance of teaching objective, the teachers make students feel success; form positive learning attitude and promote the ability in practical application by means of task-based language teaching." Soon, the task-based language teaching and its related fields are widely promoted and fast developing in both elementary schools and high schools.Against this background, the paper has completed an investigation into the task-based language teaching carried out at a private high school. This study took 15 teachers of the school as the subjects, used questionnaires, interview, and classroom observation to collect data, which were then analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The aim of this study was to answer questions about the features of teachers in private senior high schools, their beliefs in the task-based language teaching, its operation in classes, its effects on students and the difficulties the schools encountered in its application.The results show that:1. the teachers in private senior high schools are young, less experienced, yet burdened by their teaching tasks; 2. The majority of the teachers have learned about the task-based language teaching, they show great faith in its effects, and apply it frequently in their classes; 3. the task-based language teaching is widely seen in reading classes, but much less in writing, vocabulary or grammar classes; 4. some typical cases are found of task-based language teaching, where the designing of the tasks, the evaluation of teaching are still to be improved; 5. the teachers do have consensus on how to efficiently carry out task-based language teaching in their classrooms.Hopefully, this paper can provide some valuable data for relevant researches; in addition, the paper suggest private senior high schools should further strengthen the qualities of their teachers and improve the overall conditions of the schools, and the teachers there should work more on task-designing and evaluation system so as to best accommodate the task-based language teaching into English classroom.