The Application Of Task-based Approach To Oral English Teaching In Junior Middle School

Along with the further development of economic globalization and the arrival of knowledge economy,China has stepped up the pace of reform and opening-up policy greatly.More and more international companies have flown into China,which means Chinese have more opportunities to get in touch with foreigners.Therefore,the majority of English learners in China have come to realize that English is a bridge to communicate with the whole world.There is no doubt that oral English achieves a rather important status in English teaching.However,to our disappointment,there is still a big gap between the present situation and the ideal situation of oral English teaching in junior middle school.Exam-oriented education occupies an important position in Chinese Education system.Under this circumstance,the traditional teaching approach has brought about far-reaching influence on students' English learning for many years.Both teachers and students pay more attention to students' scores instead of their oral English ability.Students have no interest in oral English and their oral English ability has little improvement.This tradition teaching approach regards the teacher as the authority and students are regarded as passive receivers of new knowledge,which deviates from quality education.At the same time,it leads to weakening of students' learning interest and the low teaching effect.The traditional teaching approach puts emphasis on learning by root and ignores the rules of learners' language acquisition,which gives rise to unsatisfactory oral English teaching.Thus,the effective innovation of oral English teaching has been the focus of many English educators.In order to change this situation,the author attempts to adopt Task-based Approach to oral English Teaching.Based on the theory of constructivism,Task-based Approach originated in the 1980 s and emphasized “learning by doing”.Students can improve their oralEnglish by completing different kinds of classroom activities.Task-based Approach abandons some shortcomings of the traditional teaching approach.Based on this approach,classroom teaching will change from teacher-centered to students-centered.Thus,it is an effective approach to improve students' oral English.The thesis mainly researches the following two questions:1.Can Task-based Approach improve students' oral English ability?2.How does Task-based Approach help arouse students' interest and enhance their confidence towards oral English?Under the guidance of constructivism theory,the author conducted the experiment in her practice school from September to December in 2016.The author chose 110 students of two parallel classes of Grade Eight in author's practice school.Then the author divided the two classes into the experimental class and the control class as research subjects.Task-based Approach was used in the experimental class of Class One,while the traditional teaching approach was still used in the control class of Class Three.At the beginning of this semester,a pre-test,whose aim was to ensure that these two classes were parallel classes,was given to students both in the experimental class and the control class;next,a pre-questionnaire was given to students in these two classes..After the experiment,students both in these two classes were required to do post-test and post-questionnaire.Besides,the interview was given to students in the experimental class.The instruments used in this experiment contain two questionnaires,two oral tests,an interview and SPSS software.The experiment lasted for four months.Through comparing and analyzing the experimental results,the author concluded that Task-based Approach can improve students' oral English ability.Task-based Approach designed various life-related activities to alleviate students' anxiety effectively to some extent.And it helped teachers to encourage students to participate in various classroom activities actively.Although the author achieved expected results to some degree,there are still some limitations,such as short research time,small sample size and so on.These limitations may affect the reliability and validity of the experiment.Thus,more studies are expected to conduct in the future.