An Investigation Into The Current Situation Of Task Design In High School English Reading Teaching

Learning tasks and activities are vital for the exerting of the task-based language teaching.At present,most of the domestic studies about task-based language teaching focus on feasibility,significance,type of tasks and principles of task designing,fewer studies are conducted to investigate the quality of task design in teaching practice.In view of this reality,this research investigates into the quality of the tasks designed by the senior high school English teachers in reading teaching by answering the following three questions: First,what is the level of the senior high school English teachers' cognition of the task-based language teaching? Second,how well the tasks designed by the senior high school English teachers in reading teaching? Third,what are the major difficulties the senior high school English teachers have in designing tasks in English reading teaching?During the research,questionnaires are firstly distributed to 60 English teachers and 360 teachers from three senior high schools in Xin Yang to find out the level of the senior high school English teachers' cognition of the task-based language teaching and the principle of task design,and the students' acceptance of the reading tasks.Secondly,10 teachers of different experience of teaching years and 20 students of diverse academic achievement who participated in the questionnaire survey are interviewed to further explore the quality of the tasks designed by the senior high school English teachers,the students' acceptance of the tasks designed by the teachers,and the major difficulties that the senior high school English teachers have in designing learning tasks and the ways in which they wish to improve their levels of task design in English teaching.Lastly,in order to verify the status quo of task design in the senior high school English reading teaching,18 English teachers of different ages of teaching from three different senior high schools are observed in their reading teaching,each for 6 periods.The result of the study indicates that senior high school English teachers' cognitive level of TBLT and principles of task design is not satisfying.38.3% of teachers are not clear about TBLT,and teachers cannot apply the TBLT flexibly.The quality of the tasks designed in reading teaching is not high,mainly focusing on the drilling of language form.71.7% of the reading tasks designed are not close to the actual life of the students and are interesting;73.3% of the task activities could not help to improve students' ability to express opinions creatively and solve problems.71.7% of teachers did not design teaching tasks that help students to self-reflect and self-evaluate.30.0% of teachers did not understand the principles of task design,and 16.7% of teachers believed that time is not enough for them design carefully tasks before class,and most students were used to traditional teaching model and are not willing to cooperate in class to accomplish tasks.The inadequacy of this study is that the sample data of the survey are from the same region,and the number and diversity of samples still need to be improved.