A Study On Multidimensional Task-design In ELT In Primary Schools

Task-based Teaching first appeared in the early 1980 s. Over the past 30 years, various literature and empirical researches of Task-based Teaching emerged endlessly, which enriched the professional knowledge of Task-based Teaching. New English Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education, proclaimed by the Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China, advocates adopting Task-based Teaching in English teaching and requires the teachers to design the effective and operational tasks in order to promote the students’ English comprehensive skills. This paper is to explore the ways of multidimensional task-design in ELT in the primary schools.On the basis of Task-based Teaching Approach and the cognitive psychology theories with the methods of quantitative and qualitative for document analysis, questionnaires and interviews, this study takes 200 primary students and 15 English teachers as subjects, which aims at: 1. the current situation and existing problems of primary English learning; 2. the current situation and existing problems of primary English teaching.The survey results show that: 1. The students have a strong interest in learning English; 2. Obvious individual differences exist between the students; 3. The students like to participate in the funny learning activities, but they don’t clearly know the tasks. Through in-depth interviews, the author also finds that the primary school English teachers have insufficient understanding of task-based teaching, and their task-designs are so mechanical and unreasonable that they cannot achieve the expected teaching effect.Based on the research results, combined with the actual situation of primary English teaching, this paper tentatively puts forward the multidimensional task-design to solve the problems in the primary English teaching, which designs the tasks from three dimensions: the content, the space, and the hierarchy.