An Empirical Study Of Applying TBLT To Improving Students' Participation In Secondary Vocational English Classes

Chinese students' participation, especially Chinese vocational school students', has always been low. Although many researchers in the past had done some researches that focused on studying the causes and strategies of low participation, but they had not combined participation with teaching methodology, so that they could not fundamentally solve the problem. The present thesis tries to study the relationship between TBLT and students' participation from the perspective of empirical study. The research questions are:1) Is it feasible to apply TBLT to improving students' participation in the subject classes?2) In which aspects will TBLT improve students' participation in the subject classes?The present research used both quantity and quality research methods together, including several instruments as questionnaires, teacher-student interviews, teaching journals, and student diaries. First of all, the theories concerned with TBLT were discussed to find out the teaching factors that could improve students' participation. Then the subjects were given a questionnaire to get the knowledge of the causes for their low participation. Further, the author applied TBLT into English class to carry out a ten-week empirical study in order to examine the feasibility and effectiveness of TBLT in improving students'participation.From the experiment and data analysis, the author concluded the following accomplishments:1. It is feasible and effective to use TBLT to improve students' participation in the subject classes. After the ten-week experiment, the author found that TBLT did have positive effects on improving students' participation. That is, TBLT is an effective method not only to attract students' learning interest, but also to change students' attitude toward English learning into positive side. What's more, appropriate tasks do many goods to develop students' language using abilities, through which students' self-confidence can also be increased significantly.2. TBLT helped to improve students' participation in the following aspects:students' participation before, in and after class have all been improved in different degrees. The number of students who are willing to participate before class has increased by29.66%; The amount of students who are willing to positively think about the questions asked by the teacher has raised by53.39%; The number of students who are willing to positively cooperate with their peers has increased by44.57%; The number of students who are willing to discuss knowledge after class has raised by33.47%.In the end, the author concluded the thesis in several aspects:the major findings, the implications and the limitations of the present study as well as some suggestions for further researches.