Studies On The Application Of Task-based Approach In English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Many Chinese junior high school students, especially those in the rural areas, have low vocabulary using abilities, which is bad for their development of the four language skills---listening, speaking, reading and writing.The overall goal of the English curriculum in the compulsory education stage is to make students form preliminary comprehensive language using ability through English studies. Vocabulary is the building blocks of a language. Improving students’ vocabulary using ability is the basis and premise to cultivate their comprehensive language using ability. Therefore, a way should be found to improving students’ vocabulary using ability.Task-based approach is a new second language teaching method advocating "learning by doing" in the belief that language acquisition is achieved in meaningful communication, which provides many favorable conditions for improving students’ vocabulary using ability in theory, such as similar to authentic communicative context, abundant input, repetition, output of target words, and meaning negotiation between learners and so on.This study wants to investigate whether task-based approach is effective in improving students’vocabulary using ability, what the influence of task-based approach on learners’attitudes towards vocabulary learning is and what the teacher’s attitudes towards task-based vocabulary teaching are, for the purpose to check the practical value of this method in improving learners’vocabulary using ability.The author randomly selected two parallel classes from the Junior High School of Gongnong Village in Tanggu District of Tianjin to conduct teaching experiment. One is experimental class, taught by using task-based approach. As a comparison, the other one is control class, taught by using traditional vocabulary teaching method. The teaching experiments lasted for three months. Tests, questionnaire and interview were used to collect necessary quantitative and qualitative data to be analyzed by SPSS (17.0).The findings of this research manifest that task-based approach is effective in improving students’vocabulary using ability. The influence of task-based approach on learner’s attitudes towards vocabulary learning is positive:students have great interest and confidence in learning English vocabulary. And this method is accepted and praised by teachers.However, there are still some problems existing in task-based approach in practice. Under the background of big classes in China, students are usually divided into different groups to complete the tasks. But the effect of group-activities is difficult to guarantee as the situations of students’ participation are different and the teacher’s feedbacks are not timely. Therefore, how to organize team activities effectively still needs further study.