A Case Study On Information-Gap Tasks In Oral Activities In Senior High School

As we all know, language is the basic of communication. The students in China have learned English for a long time. They learned it for communication. During the author’s internship, she found that the present communicative competency of high school students seems to be far from this goal. Multi-dimensional factors result in this situation. For example, in traditional English class, the teachers just focus on practicing pattern drills. The students treat teachers as the only resource of learning English and they lack of ability of teaching themselves. Besides, in almost all the classes, teachers dominate the whole class.The students have no chance to critic or suspect what the teacher said. They can’t communicate or interact with teacher, for there is no information-gap between them.Task based language teaching is the fundamental theory of information gap tasks. As one of the most important tasks in language teaching, information gap tasks is effective on teaching English. What information gap means is that something one knows is what the other doesn’t know. They need to communicate with each other so as to narrow the gap. In recent years, the teachers of English have paid attention to it. Based on the information gap is a better tool in promoting real communication, arousing and keeping learners’ interest than other language teaching methods. In a word, real communication is based on information gap.The author chooses60students of Grade One from a high school as experimental subjects. Before the information gap tasks are carried out, a questionnaire is given to students to assess their participation interest in English learning. During the class, the author carried out the information gap tasks and observed it. After the class, the author drew a conclusion that the information gap tasks are helpful to improve students’participation in oral activities. In order to improve the students’ oral competence, the teachers should pay much attention to information gap tasks in English teaching. This thesis aims at finding out and solving the problems in the author’s teaching design in the following three aspects:1If the author follow the principles of TBLT when she carry out the task design.2If the linguistic forms in the task design is wide enough.3If information gap tasks are helpful to improve the students’participation to the oral activities.