The Application Of Task-based Approach To Oral English Teaching In Junior High Schools

With the deepening of China’s reform and economic globalization,the exchanges between China and foreign countries become frequent;English plays an important role increasingly. The Chinese have more andmore opportunities to contact with foreigner. Social requirements for oralEnglish are also increasing. However, the current situation of Englishteaching is not satisfactory. Although many students can grasp grammarbetter, their interpersonal skills are poor. Most students’ oral English isnot satisfactory and “dumb English” really exists among the middleschool students. The New Curriculum Standards emphasize that Englishteachers should teach the basic English knowledge to the middle schoolstudents and train them essential skills. Meanwhile, teachers should paymore attention to fostering the students’ capability of practicalcommunication in English. That is, improving students’ oral English levelis one of the most important things in English teaching. However, themiddle school students’ oral English level is not optimistic. Their oralEnglish is not very good; they have a little interest and confidence in oralEnglish. To some extent, traditional teaching methods can not makestudents greatly love to speak English and improve their oral English.Therefore, it is urgent and important for us to improve the students’ oralEnglish by looking for a meaningful and valuable teaching method. Task-based approach becomes a popular word in English teachingcircle. This relatively new teaching methodology was evolved from CLT(Communicative Language Teaching) and has developed since1980s,which emphasizes “learning by doing” and offers students an opportunityto use language in the classroom. Nowadays, in China, many books andarticles pay attention to the adoption of this approach to the teaching inprimary and secondary school and universities. Under this circumstance,the author attempts to discover whether this approach can help arouse thestudents’ more interest in learning oral English than the traditional PPPapproach.This paper is based on language acquisition theory, constructivismtheory and social interaction theory as theoretical bases and takes Willis’TBA as model. It studies the application of TBA to Oral English teachingin a junior middle school. The subjects of this study are students in twodifferent classes in Grade Eight in No.9Middle School of Tangshan,Hebei Province. The author chooses Class1Grade8as the experimentalclass, using TBA, while Class9as the control class, adopting traditionalteaching method. The tools of this survey are two questionnaires, two oraltest papers and an interview. The method and procedure of this study is asfollows: The author first carried out questionnaire investigation and oralEnglish test on the two classes before the experiment. The major purposewas to learn the students’ attitude, interests, self-confidence and the level of oral English. The results showed that there was no significantdifference between the two classes. According to the problems existed inoral English, the author taught purposely when carrying out TBA. First,the author introduced the background, illustrated the teaching tasks, andthen allocated different tasks to different study groups, asked them todiscuss and make reports, and finally, analyzed the language focus andguided practice. After the experiment, the author carried out the secondquestionnaire, oral test and an interview, the results indicated that TBAhas a positive influence on students’ oral English, and TBA is superior tothe traditional teaching method. All data were analyzed with SPSS13.0software.The author achieved the anticipative goals through the study. And thefollowingsshow that:1. TBA can improve students’ oral English learning interest, arousestudent’sself-confidence, and build up positive attitude.2. TBA has greatly inspired students’ impetus in English learning,improved theirEnglish level and communication skills.3. TBA has made a great alteration in oral English class from theteacher-centered to the students-centered.This study has some shortcomings, such as shorter research time,fewer and narrow subjects, which may affect the accuracy of dataanalysis. But it is assumed that the study may provide a truthfuldescription of TBA in oral English in middle school.