A Study On Application Of Task-based Teaching In High School English Speaking Classes

Under the circumstances of increasingly globalized world, the importance of oral English can be hardly ignored, which means higher requirements are put forward in terms of Chinese students’ oral English skills in the areas of pronunciation, fluency, lexicon and grammar thus the class teaching principles and methods should be altered to accord with this new trend. However, the real situation in class is disappointing in that teacher dominance, overuse of repeated drills and ignorance of students’ autonomy still are prevalent, causing the unsatisfying performance in students’ spoken English after their graduation from high school. Therefore, to look for a solution, the author of this thesis chooses TBLT as the research subject, elaborates the feasibility of applying TBLT in English speaking classes based on the reviews of its development and established studies and cases. On the other hand, as an observer, the author conducts a 14-week long teaching practice in order to demonstrate the actual delivery of TBLT in class by one native English instructor with the purpose of improving students’oral English abilities, intending to see whether TBLT is an effective teaching method to boost students’English speaking skills by looking at the results difference between pre-test and post-test for experimental group as well as contrasting their performance to that of the control group. In addition, a questionnaire is created to find out experimental group’s attitude and acceptability towards TBLT by collecting and analyzing their responses.According to the data and results received from the assessments and questionnaire, it is found that TBLT can increase the high school students’motivation, especially in the aspect of building their confidence and willingness of expressing thoughts in spoken English. Moreover, TBLT is also a practical teaching method useful to develop the high school students’oral English abilities, especially in terms of their language fluency. A few implications are also summarized based on the study. Teachers are suggested to design teaching tasks suitable for students to build on their existing language level and accorded with their needs. Those tasks should be helpful to create a learning environment, ideal for students to actively express ideas and interactively communicate with their classmates so that students are given more opportunities of meaningful English speaking practice which places a positive influence on them linguistically and mentally. Adjustment of tasks is also recommended if students show a need for working on a specific area of their English speaking skills.