An Application Of Task-based Approach On Teaching Passive Voice In Junior School

Passive voice is an important language point as well as a difficult one in JuniorSchool. Many teachers usually adopt the teaching method of teacher’s presentingrules–student’s mechanical practice, which reduces students’ interest in learning andthe ability of mastering this grammar point. Besides, there are differences in passivevoice between Chinese and English. Those two problems mentioned above besidesother problems lead to great difficulty to the junior students in learning the Englishpassive voice.Compared with the traditional teaching method, the Task-based teachingapproach contains new teaching ideas and method. It takes specific tasks as thelearning motivation, task accomplishment as the learning process, and finally thedemonstration of the product as the representation of the teaching achievement.Task-based teaching approach is of great help in cultivate the cooperativeconsciousness and ability of self-aided study, developing students’ comprehensiveability of using the targeted language, so that quality of English teaching is improved.At present, the task-based teaching approach has been widely applied to the teachingof reading, writing and vocabulary, yet it is still rare to have this approach applied tothe teaching of a certain grammar item such as English passive voice in junior school.The thesis mainly attempts to explore the application of the task-based teachingapproach to the teaching of English passive voice in junior school throughexperimentation on two natural classes for three months. The results indicate that thetask-teaching approach works effectively in helping students to learn the Englishpassive voice, greatly raising students’ interest in English learning and their ability ofusing English. What’s more, in the process of the experiments, the teachers haveimproved their own qualities. Meanwhile, the experiments reveal some problems,such as both the teachers and students should pay much more time and attention.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces briefly the majorproblems in teaching English passive voice in junior school. The chapter alsointroduces previous researches, purpose and significance, research methods andoutline of the present thesis. Chapter Two firstly gives a brief introduction of thenature and features of the task-based approach, and then presents a detailed account ofprinciples and processes of carrying out the task-based teaching approach, which lays a foundation for the following chapter. Chapter Three is an account of the experimentconducted in two classes of Xiangtan No.3Middle School. Chapter Four is adiscussion and analysis of the experiment results including its advantages andproblems. Chapter Five is the Conclusion.