Application Of Task-based Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior School

Vocabulary teaching is an essential part of foreign language teaching. The effectivevocabulary teaching facilities the completion of the teaching aims. In senior middle school,however, there exist problems in vocabulary teaching since conventional teaching methodsare adopted. Faced with the enormous vocabulary, many students have trouble inremembering them. Even if they have recited the words, they fail to use them properly inauthentic situation. Scholars and teachers at home and abroad have been undertaking theresearch and implementation of vocabulary teaching with the development of the teachingreforms. In China there are large quantities of essays on how to teach vocabulary and manyadvanced teaching approaches. In recent years, task-based instruction has received more andmore concern from both practitioners and researchers. Task-based instruction provideslearners many opportunities to learn and practice language by participating various activitiesand implementing a variety of learning tasks. But most of the studies focus on research intothe four skills of language learning (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). Researchesinto the effectiveness of the Task-Based Approach in vocabulary teaching, especially forsenior students, are far from satisfactory. The author of this paper intends to testify theeffectiveness of task-based vocabulary teaching through classroom experiment. The NationalEnglish Curriculum has set a much higher standard for senior students in their vocabularylearning. In conventional approaches, English vocabulary teaching fails to develop thestudents’ competence of using language and therefore is not helpful to the vocabularyacquisition. Task-based English vocabulary teaching provides a meaningful context forvocabulary acquisition, which facilitates the students’ intake process. The subjects of thisresearch are the132students in Senior One in Wuji Middle School. The subjects consist oftwo groups,65in the experimental group, and67are in the control group, on the basis ofwhich, the author experiments with Task-based Approach in classroom English teaching for awhole term. The author collects information and data through tests and questionnaires andsoftware SPSS16.0is employed to analyze the data and information collected from thesubjects. The result of the research shows that Teaching English vocabulary throughTask-Based Approach in senior middle school can improve students’ ability to learn and use English vocabulary. Plus, using tasks in teaching vocabulary promotes fluency, accuracy andvariety of output vocabulary in their oral and written English. Moreover, Task-basedApproach can help to arouse students’ learning interest and stimulate their motivation inlearning vocabulary. However，the limited number of subjects and duration of the researchare not enough to ensure that using Task-based Approach is effective in all the senior middleschools in China. More classroom experimentations in more classes in the author’s schooland in more senior schools are needed to testify the efficiency of Task-based Approach insenior English vocabulary teaching.