A Study On Designing And Implementing Tasks For SEFC Classrooms

Along with the high speed development of China's economy and culture, English teaching has been developing very fast from teaching materials to teaching methods in order to meet different needs of different people. In middle schools this development shows even greater urgency and importance. The issue of the new English curriculum for senior middle school sets higher demands on better teaching and learning methods and effects as well. As one of the most dominant language teaching approaches in the world nowadays, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is making its way to dominate the English teaching as a foreign language in China.With solid theoretical ground and profound empirical data, TBLT shows great attraction to syllabus designers, language teachers and also language learners. Yet it's still a new lesson for most of the English teachers in China to learn. So this thesis takes studying the most scientific and effective use of TBLT in China with the current English teaching textbooks as its purpose. It not only studies the theoretical basis of TBLT, but also makes careful research on how to design and implement tasks in SEFC (Senior English For China) classrooms in details.This thesis studies the theory and practice of TBLT with practical use of this approach as its goal. It clarifies the theoretical basis of TBLT from the cognitive and language perspectives so that readers of this thesis can easily accept the advantages of TBLT. It cites some famous researchers' remarks about the definitions and characteristics of task and task-based instruction to give a clear idea about task and task-based language teaching. Then it provides some important rationales about what needs to be considered carefully before designing a task, including task difficulty, task dimension, task types, task authenticity and so on. It puts great emphasis on how to design all kinds of tasks for the SEFC classrooms. There are examples of listening, speaking, reading and writing tasks for different units in SEFC books. Also this thesis works out rich and colorful settings and models to implement the tasks in classrooms for better learning effects.This study is a report on Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT).It was conducted in two intact classes with 130 students in Grade One in JingYuan No.2 Senior Middle School .One class was an experimental group and the other class was a control group. There are 64 students in Class 1 which was an experimental class. There are 66 students in Class 2 which was a control class. Each class was taught by the same teacher. The task-based language teaching was implemented in the experimental class while the traditional teaching method was still used in the control class. Data was collect twice before and after the experiment. The data was analyzed by using SPSS 13.0(Statistical Package for the Social Science,Version,13.0) to show that the TBLT which incorporates in the traditional teaching is more effective and better than the traditional one.This thesis is composed of five parts: Part I provides a general introduction of TBLT. It covers the background of the research and the purpose of the study. Part II presents some general theories related to tasks and TBLT, including General situation of English language teaching in senior middle schools in China, theoretical basis, features of TBLT and so on. Part III is focused on the designing of tasks and the principles, authenticity principle, form-function, task dependency and learning by doing principle. Part IV discusses the application of TBL in senior middle schools. A study of TBLT was conducted in an experimental class and a control class and feedback information was sought by means of a pre-test and a post-test employed to the experimental class and the control class. By analyzing and comparing the result of the pre-test and the post-test, implications of TBLT to foreign language teaching in senior middle schools were collected. Part VI concludes the whole thesis as follows: the TBLT is an effective teaching approach but there are some limitations of the present study, and suggestions for further research.