Nowadays, Chinese people have much more opportunities to communicate withforeigners because of the reform and opening-up. So more and more Chinese peoplestudy English for many reasons and in many ways. Since the 1970s, many languageteaching methods have been introduced to the English classroom in middle school,such as the Grammar-Translation Method, the Direct Method, the Audio-visualApproach and the Functional Approach etc. These teaching methods are suitable forthe Chinese education pattern which is under the exam-oriented education for a longtime. So English teaching in the middle school classroom is managed byteacher-centered approach. And the teachers in general pay more attention to thegrammar and vocabulary which could make the students gain more scores in the exam.The students are just regarded as followers and the teachers are controllers. If thingsgo on like this, the students would lack interests and lose their enthusiasm in learningEnglish. The teachers ignore the students’ language competence of speaking inEnglish and this goes against that language is an instrument of communication.Although the students have learned English from primary school or even younger,their language competence are weak especially in oral English. A universalphenomenon is that most of the middle school students do a good job in analyzingsentence structure, reading comprehension and writing a composition, but it isdifficult to open their mouth to communicate with others in the English classroom orin the real life.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Basic Concepts related to TBLT
As to the task-based language teaching (TBLT), we should make certainunderstanding about the definition of task firstly. Many scholars have their ownopinion about task. They account for the definitions of task in teaching, learning or onboth of the two aspects. In the following section, the author will list some typicalviews about definitions by some experts who make great contributions to researchesabout TBLT.In the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (7thedition), the definition of taskis interpreted as “a piece of work that somebody has to do, especially a hard orunpleasant one; an activity which is designed to help achieve a particular learninggoal.” and this is the understanding of “task” by most people.For the second language researchers and linguists, they have their own understanding about “task” from different perspectives. But there is no oneauthoritative definition which is accepted in general.The following will illustratesome descriptions of the “task” by some scholars’viewpoints.Long is one of the earliest scholars who does the research on TBLT.She claimed that “A task is a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freelyor for some reward.”2.2 Previous Studies of TBLT
Although TBLT is newly emerging teaching method in 1980s, it has attract manyscholars and researcher to study about it and developed rapidly. Some famous expertsand linguists who do the researches on second language such as Long (1985), Crookes(1986), Prabhu (1987), Nunan (1989),Willis (1996), Skehan (1998), Littlewood(2002), Ellis (2003) and other researchers have made great contribution on the studiesof TBLT on theoretical perspective or implementation. In this part of the thesis, somerepresentative studies on TBLT abroad and at home will be introduced briefly inchronological sequence.Prabhu(1987) firstly proposed to apply TBLT in secondary school classroom inhis Bangalore Project in the Southern India. He assumed that “when the students takemore attention on the meaning of language than the form they can learn languagemore effectively.” So this project rejects form-focus teaching and syllabus of language.Instead, it adopted procedure or task syllabus namely problem-solving tasks whichremain to be completed by the students. The whole project was divided into threeparts during the teaching procedure, they are pre-task, task and post-task. He believedthat
