Focus Task Teaching Design

The form and content of language has always been one of the most fundamental questions in second language teaching theory. It is the goal of teaching theory to achieve the balance of language form and content in the teaching process.This article regards focus-based task as the best way to reach the balance between form and content. Focus-based task not only helps reflect the advantage of task-based teaching but also guarantees systematic grammar structure teaching. Under the premise of grammatical structure being the key link, it is possible to help students develop inner system of language independently by a series of tasks but special drills. In the process of fulfilling tasks, the student will pick up the language form while concerning the language content in the main, which not only improves the fluency and appropriateness of communication but also guarantees the accuracy of language usage.This research integrates the input theory, output theory and interactive theory and discusses the concept, principle and method of focus-based task design. While devising tasks, a special attention should be paid to the composition of both input tasks and output tasks. An appropriate design of input tasks in their right languistic forms is essential, for it determines whether learners can really understand both the structural form and communication function of relevant language points, and affects the extent to which the output task can be fulfilled.In this research, an experiment is conducted on two junior grammar points in the framework of focus-based task design. According to the classroom observation and test comparision after the experiment, it proves that setting task as teaching unit does not necessarily mean weakening systematic grammar structure teaching nor the accuracy of grammar. On the contrary, under the condition of keeping accuracy, using focus-based task as teaching method can help learners better understand the forms of language in specific contexts and the function of language in communication, hence a better improvement of proficiency in terms of accuracy, fluency and approriateness.