Oral English Teaching In Senior High School:A Study On Task-based Language Teaching Strategies

Due attention has not been paid to oral English teaching in China's senior high school,as traditional test-oriented teaching has always been a predominant approach that lays emphasis on vocabulary and grammar rather than on the cultivation of students'comprehensive ability to apply knowledge acquired to practical life situations.A great number of students of English in China,after many years of English learning,are unable to communicate orally in English,a fact that does not meet the demand of social development and,more specifically,international trade.Therefore,there is a growing concern about how to improve the competence of oral English on the part of the students in senior high school.The National English Curriculum Standard issued in 2001 upholds the task-based approach as one of the key teaching methods.The present study conducts an experiment on the application of the task-based approach to teaching oral English in senior high school through literature review,questionnaire and a period of minor experiments.Taking Fuzhou Foreign Languages School as our case study,the present paper gives a report on the dynamic relationship between the task-based approach and the oral English development of senior high school students,focusing on the following two interrelated questions:1)Does the experiment class perform better than the controlled class for this purpose?2)why is the task-based approach better than the traditional PPP teaching mode in improving students oral English?With the major finding of the experiment class really performing better than the controlled class,the present study puts forward some suggestions on how to use the task-based approach to teaching oral English to senior high school students more efficiently and,more importantly,on how to overcome some problems in the process.