Improving The Senior High School Students' Speaking Ability With Tasks

Teaching spoken language is the most difficult part in L2 teaching of China. Influenced by the National Matriculation English Test and traditional teaching method, our focus in the English teaching is always on grammar and knowledge, but not on performance. Students can't apply the knowledge to real life. So after many years' English study, they still have difficulty in using English aurally and orally. It shows that our English teaching isn't very ideal and it can't adapt to the development of the economy and society. Improving the students' communicative competence, especially the spoken ability, has become the focus of language teaching.Research into Task-based Language Teaching became very popular since the beginning of this century. The Chinese Ministry of Education enacted the "New English Curriculum" in 2001. In this criterion, TBLT was stipulated as one of the main learning approaches in Chinese Secondary School English classes.This essay is about how to combine the TBLT with spoken language teaching. There are mainly five chapters in this study.Chapter One is an introduction, which states the purpose and significance of the study.Chapter Two is about literature review, with emphasis on TBLT and the spoken language teaching. It also analyses the factors that affected students' speaking ability developments from students, teachers and teaching materials.Chapter Three deals with the experimental design of this study. To test the hypothesis of the study, the author conducted an experimental research and a questionnaire into two classes of the author's senior high school with about 120 students aged on average 17 over a period of twenty weeks. Two tests were given to the subjects from the EC and CC. Then the relevant data was collected and analyzed.Chapter Four is about how to solve the problem. The author put forward a speaking-activating mode based on Task-based Language Teaching. That is, Promoting speaking by listening; facilitating teaching through reasonable assessment; improving teaching by designing tasks elaborately.Chapter Five comes up with the conclusion. The statistical results reveal that TBLT is a good approach in teaching spoken language.At last, the author points out many advantages and limitations of TBLT. It is hoped that the study will provide some insight into English teaching and give senior high school teachers more options in both how they develop and how they assess their students' speaking ability.