A Study On The Effects Of Task-Based Language Teaching On The Alleviation Of English Speaking Anxiety For Junior Middle School Students

With the development of globalization,oral English teaching has been paid more attention by schools and parents.However,one of the main problems in English speaking learning and teaching is that students dare not express themselves in English and experience English speaking anxiety.In junior middle school English classes,students’ oral communication ability is often ignored while great attention is paid on reading and grammar teaching to achieve high scores in high school entrance examination.Starting from 2020,with a new round of reform of the high school entrance examination,oral English examination will be officially implemented.Therefore,it is imperative to alleviate students’English speaking anxiety by changing the teaching in class.Task-based language teaching is a kind of language teaching method that emphasizes teaching in the authentic context and learning by doing.Students acquire language through completing tasks designed by teacher.The purpose of this study is to explore whether the implementation of task-based teaching can alleviate students’ English speaking anxiety and improve their oral English proficiency.This paper mainly studies the following questions:(1)What is the current situation of junior middle school students’ English speaking anxiety?(2)What are the effects of adopting TBLT in speaking class on alleviating students’English speaking anxiety in junior middle school?(3)How does the adoption of TBLT in speaking class influence students’ oral English proficiency?First of all,questionnaire survey and interview are carried out to learn the current situation of students’ English speaking anxiety.Secondly,a task-based oral English teaching mode is designed,and more than two months of teaching experiment is carried out.At last,a questionnaire survey is conducted again after the teaching experiment to test the effect of task-based teaching method on alleviating students’ English speaking anxiety;the oral English pre-test and post-test are used to examine whether there is significant difference in oral English proficiency between the experimental class and control class after the teaching experiment.In the meanwhile,the students’ opinions and suggestions on the task-based oral English teaching are interviewed and discussed.The results show that junior middle school students have a high level of English speaking anxiety,the biggest source of which is classroom anxiety,followed by personality anxiety and test anxiety,then fear of negative evaluation and communication anxiety.The task-based teaching method can effectively alleviate the junior middle school students’English speaking anxiety.The task-based teaching mode creates a lively and relaxed classroom atmosphere which reduces students’ nervousness and the multi-dimensional evaluation in class increases students’ self-confidence.Task-based teaching method can improve students’ oral English proficiency.The task design in authentic context with different types and difficulties can take care of students of different English levels and increase students’ enthusiasm to learn oral English,which improves students’ oral proficiency naturally.Teachers should pay attention to students’English speaking anxiety in and out of class and the design of task-based teaching should conform to the situation of different students in order to improve students’oral English proficiency.