Investigation On Students’ Participation In Task-based Oral English Class In Junior Middle Schools

In the new edition of the National Curriculum Standard for English Teaching published by theEducation Department of People’s Republic of China, Task-based Language Teaching Method isencouraged to be carried out by the English teachers. Task-based Language Teaching Method requires theteachers to design tasks which can prepare the students for their daily-life communication and meaningfulteaching contexts and exercise task. At the same time, the students’ participation is deeply effected by theTask-based Language Teaching Method and the teaching tasks. TBLT and the real-life teaching tasks makethe students can acquire English, develop language skills: listening, reading, writing, especially speaking,and improve the ability of language use through involving and cooperating.This paper explored the influence of Task-based Language Teaching on junior middle school students’participation in English speaking class through a real case of Zhaogu Central School, Huixian, Henanprovince. Students’ participation in classroom activities plays an important role in students’ learning ofEnglish, especially English speaking. The linguist Herber H. Clark (1996) says,“Language is used fordoing things”. Based on the previous studies, the researcher focused on exploring and solving the problemsexisting in the current situation of students’ participation in a task-based English speaking class in juniormiddle schools and tries to improve the students’ participation in English speaking class. The writer paysmore attention to the task design and carries out some teaching practice according to the principle of TBLT.This paper does an investigation about the problems of students in task-based English speaking classin a middle school. This study is designed to focus on those following questions:1. What’s the current situation of students’ participation in a task-based English speaking class injunior middle schools?2. Are there any problems affecting students’ participation? If any, what are the main factors thataffect students’ participation in a TBLT English speaking class?3. What are the suggestions to improve the student’s speaking involvement?Class observation, interview and questionnaire are used as research methodology in this paper. Theobject of the survey is150students and1teacher from a junior middle school in Zhaogu Central School, Huixian. The60participants are from grade nine and they are from different age, gender, character andEnglish level. This study includes one female teacher. The purpose sets out to prove different aspects ofparticipants have different influence on the students’ participation.The study has the following findings:1. Compared with the traditional teaching method, TBLT is much more useful to improve the students’speaking participation in junior middle schools.2. There are many facts that affect the student’s speaking involvement in TBLT class.3. Teachers should take various actions to prompt the TBLT method to help improving the students’participation.The whole paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction that states thebackground and objectives of the research. Chapter Two is the literature review which reviews the maindefinitions and related theories: the Input Hypothesis, the Interaction Hypothesis and the OutputHypothesis and the theories of TBLT.Chapter Three states the study design: research questions, subject of the survey, researchmethodology and instruments and research procedure. Chapter Four and Five deal with the results and dataanalysis, the findings, pedagogical implication, limitations of the study, and recommendation for furtherstudy.