A Study On The Application Of Tblt To English Writing In Junior High Schools

Task-based language teaching approach(TBLT)refers to “an approach based on the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching”.It not only stresses the importance of language use but also language form.The nature of this approach is to develop students' comprehensive language competence through the process of completing real tasks,such as applying to the university,booking a flight,making handmade newspapers and so on.Then author applied this approach to the writing instruction and conducted a 4-month action research in Luohe Foreign Language Middle School,aiming to check what impacts TBLT may bring to students' writing.During the process of the research,the author carefully recorded and reflected the following questions:(1)What problems may arise in the application of TBLT to writing instruction? What are the possible causes?(2)What methods can be used to solve these problems more effectively? The subjects selected for this research were the sixty Grade 8 students in class 8 in this school.Questionnaires,classroom observations,tests and interview were all employed in this research to analyze the data from both qualitative and quantitative ways.Through the comparison and analysis of the data from both before and after the experiment,the author found that TBLT did bring a lot of benefits to students,such as it can effectively improve students' interests in English,especially in the pre-task and post-task stage;most of the students have acquired the basic writing skills required in English curriculum standards at the end of the experiment etc.However,the process of the experiment was not totally problem-free,for example: for lack of autonomous learning ability,many students showed low ability to adapt to the task-based classroom;in the process of peer review,slow students had great difficulty in reviewing the writing products of fast students,which led to their passive position and low interests to the writing class;some students focused their eyes on marks,neglecting the training of their writing ability etc.Through a deep and careful reflection of the problems,the author adopted the following strategies to solve the problems,such as modifying the design of tasks,asking students to write learning reflection and regrouping them etc.The results showed that these problems had been eliminated or lessened to some degree.