Teaching Composition With Task-based Group Learning Class

Various approaches to English language teaching in China have been explored ever since the early 1980s, with a certain fruitfulness, namely, among them, TBL is gaining popularity and it is even proposed in the latest "English Curriculum standard For Chinese Average Senior Schools". Like any other teaching approach, TBL is not perfect and it is not exclusive. Any approach alone does not solve all problems. Any approach alone does not meet all the requirements. One area that has not been fully developed as a milieu for TBL is the area of academic composition in ESL/EFL situations. In this regard, the author of this study attempts to apply the Group Learning Strategy, combined with the Task-based Learning approach, to her composition class and consequently finds it effective in an unexpectedly desirable manner. Moreover, the author aims at to answer the following research questions and prove the hypothesis: 1) Is group learning strategy effective in improving students'achievement in composition in task-based class? Hypothesis: group writing tasks encourage student-to-student learning, focuses each students on consciously considering every linguistic or structural choice and reinforces the organization of the essay as a set of distinct but interrelated structural units. 2) What kinds of problems or difficulties often arise in using this strategy? 3) How can we solve or avoid the problems? The thesis consists of six chapters: Chapter One is an introduction, which gives a very brief account of task-based group writing approach. In the end, the author points out the necessity and validity of carrying out this present study. Chapter Two mainly builds up the theoretical position of language learning strategies. Firstly it deals with the existing different types of definitions, classifications. Then it illustrates the cooperative learning strategy. Finally, some researches on language learning styles are also described in this part. Chapter Three is concerned with the central topic interaction in ELT classroom group learning strategy. Here the author illustrates some issues about ELT classroom interaction. Some previous researches on this topic are also stated. Chapter Four illustrates the definitions of tasks and the components of tasks in English language teaching. It discusses its scientific ideas from a cognitive perspective and analyzes two main trends of misunderstandings and deviations existing in TBLT. Chapter Five focuses on the present study. In this part, the author introduces the study methods, the participant selection, and the study procedure and describes the results of the study and the analysis of the results.The last chapter of this thesis concludes the whole paper and gives some advice of the pedagogy and the future research in this field.