A Study On The Communication-oriented Tasks In Senior High School English Textbooks

Tasks assume a pivotal position in both second language research and education, especially an essential pedagogical unit in task-based language teaching that emerges as a central concept of our National English Curriculum Standard (NECS). Presenting communicative tasks that can engage all students in interaction by using the target language is an effective approach to ensure every student can achieve success.Despite that NECS presents English teachers with some guidelines to design tasks for learning and teaching, most teachers are at a loss as to how to design an appropriate task for providing learners with optimal learning opportunities. The breakdown lies in that NECS fails to equip teachers with the well-informed knowledge of what exactly a task is and how tasks facilitate language learning and use. This study, based on Nunan’s task evaluation framework, aims to explore the pros and cons of a set of original senior high school textbooks Solutions (published by Oxford University Press in 2012 and adopted by Wuhan Foreign Languages School in 2015), which advocate presenting lessons around tasks to offer well-contextualized communication opportunities. Meanwhile, suggestions will be provided in terms of developing effective tasks within textbooks for learners in the task-based language learning context. The main issues to be addressed can be described as follows:1) What are the major strengths of the tasks in Solutions’? How do they facilitate learners’language learning?2) What are the major deficiencies of the tasks in Solutions?This study focused on the text analysis of task-in-textbook during the pre-use evaluation phase. Major findings can be elicited in two aspects:the strengths and deficiencies of tasks in Solutions respectively. As for the strengths, Solutions has been mostly modernized with new content and effective tasks to draw in students in various authentic contexts and to prepare them for communication in the target language. More importantly, speaking tasks are integrated into every lesson with modified input, which gives students constant opportunities to speak and helps them develop both oral accuracy and fluency. However, three deficiencies are noteworthy. The first is that the one-lesson-per-page plan in an approximately 45-minute period is most likely to exert anxiety on L2 learners and to prohibit students from developing communicative competence, which is in a diametrically opposite direction as Solutions designers expect. One more deficiency relates to the inappropriate L1 use, encouraging learners to translate grammar items and new-learnt vocabulary into native language, where the target language can effectively elicit meaning negotiation and cultivate learners’ English thinking way. The last limitation is that the extension part of vocabulary and grammar, providing extra practice and reference without specific contexts, focuses on form excessively.Implications drawn from the major findings include three aspects:Firstly, learners’roles, especially active roles deserve more attention and "task cycle" can be made full use of for promoting learners’acquisition; additionally, a promising aspect for task study has been put forward relating to researching tasks and process from the learner’s perspective; pedagogical implications also have been related to, concentrating on how to ensure task effectiveness for providing optimal learning opportunities.