Application Of Task-Based Approach In Junior Middle School English Teaching

The English teaching has always been a very important subject in China that has been discussed for a very long time. As more and more corporations with foreign countries in many fields grow increasingly, Chinese people realize the importance of learning English. Thus the storm of learning English spreads over the country. For our students in China, we have used and practiced many different ways of teaching from primary schools to middle schools. As a junior middle school English teacher, the author of the thesis thinks the three years of learning English in junior middle school is significant for the students, thus the teachers must choose and use some effective ways to teach and help the students.English is not our mother tongue, it is a foreign language. Learning a foreign language is to use it for communication. Learning English includes four basic skills:listening, speaking, reading and writing. The most commonly-used teaching approach in China is the grammar-translation approach. The major focuses of this approach are reading and writing. This approach is emphasized over and over again, because it will bring good exam scores to the students. However it narrows down the other two skills (listening and speaking) of learning. Then we have audio-lingual approach, according to the S-R theory, emphasizing listening and speaking. Then we have the direct approach and the cognitive-code approach. In1970s, the communicative approach appeared. Its aim is to communicate, not to master the grammars or structures of the sentences. In the application of all these approaches, the focus of the class teaching is still the teacher.In1980s, a new approach-the Task-based Language Teaching Approach (TBLT) is developed based on some of the traditional teaching approaches. Then it has been practiced, and proved to be one of the effective ways of teaching English. In2001, the New English Curriculum which was issued by the Ministry of Education in China first claimed clearly that English teachers must change their traditional teaching of focusing on the teachers and should combine strictly the teaching contents into the application of task-based teaching approaches as much as possible, to fulfill the purpose of learning a foreign language.This thesis aims to introduce and discuss the application of TBLT. The author will introduce the theoretical basis of TBLT including Input Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis and Skehan’s theories. The main principles and characteristics of the Task-based Language Teaching will also be stated. From the views of Nunan, Willis, Skehan and many other scholars, the definition, types, framework, and components of TBLT will be introduced. And the author will explain the changes of the teachers’ role and the learners’ role in the application of TBLT. Through practice, the thesis will show that this approach is one of the effective ways of teaching English in Junior Middle School at present. It will change the situation of teaching English in class. Then the author will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of applying TBLT in China, and make some useful suggestions as how to use the textbook, how to teach the grammar and how to help the students with poor English in teaching English.