A Study In The Application Of Social Media Aided TBL In Junior School English Teaching

Despite the fact that English teaching in China is improving on a general level,there are still some problems,such as students' lack of interest,their habit of mechanically memorizing words,and teachers' one-way imparting of knowledge.This is the result of the ignorance of how any language is actually learnt.A language is acquired through meaning construction by the learner himself when he is involved in some kind of communication with others,based on which task-based language teaching is built.In Task-based Learning(TBL),students use the target language to complete various tasks,which should resemble real-life tasks as much as possible.This is very close to how a language is actually learnt inasmuch as it is a process where the students are using the target language in a meaningful way.Meanwhile the wide spread of social media has earned itself a role in language teaching.Its part in extending limits of the TBL approach both in time and space makes it possible to merge these two together in teaching.The thesis,therefore,is devoted to studies in the application of social media aided TBL in junior school English teaching.In this study the author introduces this new approach into the class to bring some change to the traditional and less efficient way of teaching.Through interesting tasks in TBL,the students start to take the lead role in learning and learn while engaged in communicative tasks.Meanwhile,social media,with its popularity and multiple functions,helps to facilitate the actual implementation of TBL in classrooms.In this study the author adopts empirical research,questionnaires,interview and classroom observations to see if this approach can improve students' overall linguistic performance and raise their interest in and attitude towards English.At first,both classes did the questionnaire on attitudes and interest,and their scores on a previous test were also collected to make sure they were on the same level.During the 3-month experiment,the author adopted PPP and TBL respectively and handed out questionnaires again.They also took a test whose scores were collected.The author also sorted out notes made during class observations and interviews with the students.The data collected were then processed by SPSS 16.0.The author was able to prove,with the above data,that the new approach can improve the students' overall linguistic performance and raise students' interest in and attitude towards learning English.