A Comparative Study Of The Oral English Activities Implementation Between Pre-service Teachers And In-service Teachers In Junior High School From The Perspective Of Task-Based Language Teaching

Oral English is important for students to communicate in English.Developing oral English is an important goal of language teaching and language learning.In recent years,Task-Based Language Teaching has been widely advocated in junior high school,but the real implementation of Task-Based Language Teaching in the classroom teaching is still in doubt.This paper studies oral English teaching implementation of pre-service teachers and in-service teachers in junior high school by classroom observation and interview.This study aims to find out whether pre-service teachers and in-service teachers implement the Task-Based Language Teaching approach to teach oral English.It can provide suggestions for pre-service teachers and in-service teachers to use Task-Based Language Teaching approach to teach oral English.The participants are 6 pre-service English teachers and 6 in-service English teachers in a junior high school in Wuhan.The study is divided into three stages:First,the study is based on 36 oral English activities(see appendix)of 6 pre-service English teachers and 6 in-service English teachers.Second,the 36 activities are analyzed one by one under the five features of Task-Based Language Teaching.The five features are authenticity,meaning-focused,gap,language use freedom and non-linguistic outcome.Third,according to the results of the analysis,12 teachers were interviewed to know their understanding of Task-Based Language Teaching and their own oral English activities.The findings of this study are summarized as follows:First,compared with the oral English activities of pre-service teachers,those of in-service teachers conform to the five features of Task-Based Language Teaching to a larger degree,but not all in-service teachers are better at designing the Task-Based oral English activities than pre-service teachers.Second,there is a big difference within the pre-service teachers group.Some pre-service teachers design activities that conform to most of features,while other pre-service teachers design activities that hardly conform to the five features.The difference is caused by their previous learning experience and the instructions from their mentors.The conformity to the five features of Task-based Language Teaching varies within in-service teachers group.The difference within in-service teachers is due to their different attitudes toward tasks.Third,pre-service teachers appear to be better at designing activities related to students' real life than in-service teachers.Both pre-service teachers and in-service teachers do better at designing oral English activities with gap than designing oral English activities which are authentic,meaning-focused,without language control and with non-linguistic outcome.Fourth,if an activity is meaning-focused,then this activity has gap and students enjoy language use freedom in this activity.However,the opposite is not true.Authenticity and non-linguistic outcome are features which have weak link with other features.