The Instructional Design In Chinese Language Course Of Summer Camp Adopting Task-based Teaching Methodology

The fast development in economy and the increasing international influence have attracted many foreigners to come to China to experience this particular oriental culture.Local schools and institutions have promoted different programs,from professional qualified education to short-term language courses,to satisfy the increasing needs in language and culture engagement.Language and Foreign Culture Camps(we call Summer camp in this paper)is one of these programs which combines tourism and knowledge study at the same time,aiming to help campers better understand a new culture.China also have seen the importance of such programs,thus have promoted summer camps like Chinese Bridge Summer Camp hosted by Hanban and Root-seeking Summer Camp hosted by Overseas Chinese Affairs Office Of The State Council in order to present the colorful Chinese culture as well as enhancing understandings between countries.In such a summer camp,Chinese Language Course(CLC)has played an important role in displaying language and culture and can be seen as a major course in the program.Through CLC students review what they have learnt in their domestic Chinese courses and develop self-confidence to communicate with local people.Both teachers and organizers want to maximize the benefits of the program,therefore the instructional design of CLC should also be taken into account.We consider Task-based Teaching(TBT)as an innovative methodology to organize CLC.Originated from Communicative Language Teaching,TBT has become a hot-spot in the area of second language education regarding its efficiency in developing students' language proficiency and communicative ability.Many materials have shown its practicality in language teaching but still needs more evidence.Our research is based on a case study.We utilize TBT into the instructional design of CLC of 2016 Cardiff Confucius Institute Spring Camp to see whether TBT can provide applicable instructions to the design of CLC and how it can be used.The methods we adopt include literature review,surveys,interviews,class observations and so on.We depict our design from macro and micro aspect,i.e.the instructional design of the whole CLC of the Spring Camp and a single task,consisting of the teaching objectives,methodology,contents,etc.This systematically organized procedure can reflect how we use TBT in this single case.A series of feedbacks and records have been collected and some conclusions have been made on four aspects:1)The student,2)The teacher,3)The teaching material and 4)The methodology.As this case study provides practical experiences about instructional design adopting TBT as well as about CLC,this might shed some light on the relative areas and provide authentic references to second language education educators and researchers.