An Action Research On The Impact Of Task-based Language Teaching On Oral English Teaching And Learning In Middle School

Oral English ability is considered one of the most important parts of English competence and it acts as a tool to test middle school students' comprehensive English abilities as well.According to second language acquisition theory and interaction theory,the perfect way to acquire a new language is having actual communications in target language.Therefore,the task-based language teaching(TBLT),which belongs to the communicative theory,appeared as a new EFL teaching approach.In order to explore the effectiveness of TBLT on oral teaching,this study aims to answer two research questions:(1)What are the impacts of TBLT on students' attitude towards oral English learning?(2)How have students' oral English skills affected by TBLT?A three-month action research was conducted by the researcher in a middle school in Hangzhou.The research has two rounds of action and each round contains4 oral lessons.Students in the research class were required to complete tasks that aim at stimulating communications in every oral English lesson.Students' changes on learning attitude and oral ability was tested by questionnaires,face-to-face interviews and classroom observations.A comparison of test results was made between experimental class and control class to test the effects of TBLT method.The research findings are:(1)TBLT is beneficial to improve students' learning from emotional and behavioral aspects.Students hold more positive feeling in English class and build better learning habits.(2)Tasks of multi-level difficulties can help students from different levels better fit in class.(3)TBLT has a great impact on improving grammatical accuracy,speaking rate,pause rate and lexical complexity in students' performance.It shows that students can speak faster and use more content words with less grammatical errors.(4)TBLT has different impacts on students of different language proficiency.For higher level students,they improve in lexical complexity the most;while for average and lower level students,they gain progress more in grammar accuracy and speaking fluency.Some teaching implications are forwarded in the end of this study:(1)Teachers should design settings for task-based classes.(2)Teachers should change their roles from controllers to facilitators in TBLT class and to provide adequate language scaffolding for students in the pre-task phrase.(3)Teachers should use group work properly to make it a useful way for students to build communication.(4)Graded tasks can be introduced in task-based classes in order to meet different students' needs.In addition,some suggestions for language learners in middle school are given too:(1)Students should practice oral English by communicating with others,rather than just memorizing language knowledge.(2)Students should participate actively in tasks to gain more opportunities to use language.(3)Students should change their learning attitudes towards language learning by developing their own initiatives.