A Study On Teachers’ Understanding And Implementation Of Task-based Language Teaching In Chinese EFL Senior High School Classrooms

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is being promoted in many countriesaround the world as a very powerful language pedagogy, and there has been agrowing interest in task-based research in L2acquisition to transform the power ofTBLT to language pedagogy. However, teachers in China are often uncertain aboutwhat TBLT is, and unsure about how to implement TBLT in their classrooms.What’s more, very few empirical studies have been conducted to investigate TBLTfrom teachers’ perspective. Therefore, the present study aims to find answers to thefollowing three research questions:1) What understanding do Chinese EFL seniorhigh school teachers have toward TBLT?2) How do Chinese senior high schoolteachers implement TBLT in their classrooms?3) Are there any discrepanciesbetween teachers’ understanding of TBLT and their implementation?103English teachers from5senior high schools in Zhuhai of Guangdongprovince participated in the present study, and completed the questionnaire for theirunderstanding of TBLT.10out of these103teachers had their English classroomteaching video recorded for observation. Quantitative analysis was conducted on thedata collected from the questionnaire, and both qualitative and quantitative analysiswere conducted on the data from classroom video recordings. Results of the dataanalysis are as follows.First, results about teachers’ understanding of TBLT are:1)64.1%of theteachers participated in the present study admit that they have received training ofTBLT, however only26.2%of them have got basic knowledge of TBLT andimplement TBLT in their everyday class.2) In figuring out the key features of TBLT,the percentage rates are as follows, student-centeredness (93.2%), authenticity(80.6%), communication (62.1%), and meaning and form (56.3%).3)72.8%of the teachers can get the overall process in implementing TBLT, but some of them do notknow what to do in the pre-task (2.8%), task (36.9%), and language focus (17.4%)stage.Second, the results of teachers’ implementation of TBLT are:1) About taskcycle, most teachers follow the framework put forward by Willis (1996). They alsoexhibit their own characteristics, such as that pedagogical tasks come ahead of realworld tasks.2) About task communication, teachers are not accustomed to pair workand group work (34.6%). Most of the tasks are done individually (65.4%).3) Aboutauthenticity, there is a lack of real world tasks (28.8%), and most of the tasks arepedagogical tasks (71.2%).4) About meaning and form, most teachers can reach abalance between them, however the problem lies in that in pursuing meaning andform, it is a teacher-centered process, and students are not learning by doing bythemselves during the process.A comparison of the data from the questionnaire and classroom observationreveals that teachers’ understanding of TBLT is better than their implementation.The result suggests that outside contextual constraints such as large class size, thegrammar-driven national college entrance examination and etc. may pose a threat toteachers’ implementation of TBLT.This research can shed some light on English teaching in senior high school inChina. Teachers’ TBLT training should be enhanced so that their theoretical leveland practical skills of TBLT can be improved. What’s more, outside contextualconstraints should be removed so that a more TBLT-friendly environment can becreated for English teachers.