A Study Of The Implementation Of Task-Based Language Teaching In Northern Sichuan Middle Schools

The Ministry of Education issued the new English Curriculum Standard inSeptember2001, which means that the English teaching in the elementaryeducation phase in China has entered a new era. In English teaching purposesaspect, the new English Curriculum Standard stresses "the development ofstudents’ comprehensive English proficiency", and "the improvement ofstudents’ abilities for actual language use", to "enable students to have theability to use language synthetically", to "improve their comprehensive abilitiesof language use in the learning process". In the English teaching strategy aspect,the new English Curriculum Standard clearly advocates the task-based teachingmode. It asks "the teachers to avoid the teaching methods in which teachers justsimply impart the knowledge, and use the ‘task-based’ teaching approach asmuch as possible".TBLT (Task-Based Language Teaching) is a foreign language teachingapproach with the international impact, which has been gradually formed anddeveloped since the1980s. It reflects the latest knowledge and research resultsof the foreign language teaching from the foreign language teaching experts andthe second language acquisition experts. It is widely used as a teaching idea allover the world and is very popular in the international foreign language teachingcircle at present. Traditionally, teacher is the center of class. What students needto do is taking notes and completing the exercises, which hurts students’ interestand self-confidence in learning English, let alone cultivates their integratedabilities of using English. However, in task-based language teaching, student isthe center of class. They have to accomplish all kinds of tasks under theguidance of the teachers in class. These challenging tasks can not only improvestudents’ feeling of success in English study, but also develop the students’abilities to use English.There has been an upsurge of the implementation of task-based languageteaching in the middle school English classes across the country, since the NewCurriculum Standard was issued by the Ministry of Education in2001. In big and medium-sized cities, this new teaching model has been well practiced anddeveloped. The ability of the students to use English practically has been greatlyimproved. However, what’s the situation in the western areas?This thesis surveys the current situation of the TBLT implementation in themiddle schools in the north of Sichuan province through questionnaires andinterviews, analyzes the related causes which lead to this situation, and providessome feasible suggestions for the TBLT implementation in the middle schools inthe north of Sichuan province, hoping to help the local schools improve theirEnglish teaching quality.