【正文】 15 The existing problems in the implementation of the TBI ............................... 15 The TBI not adopted ....................................................................................... 20 The Factors Affecting the Implementation of Tasks ............................................. 26 Teacher qualification....................................................................................... 26 Teacher preparation and resources.................................................................. 27 Language proficiency of the students ............................................................. 27 Students‘ attitudes towards TBI ...................................................................... 27 Chapter 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 29 Summary of Major Findings ................................................................................. 29 The Suggestions for the Implementation of TBI ................................................... 30 Limitation of the Convey ...................................................................................... 30 References................................................................................................................... 31 Appendix I .................................................................................................................. 33 Appendix II ................................................................................................................ 34 攻讀學(xué)位期間的研究成果 ..................................................................................... 36 List of Abbreviations (In alphabetical order) CLT: municative language teaching ECS: English Curriculum Standards EFL: English as a foreign language ESL: English as a second language SLA: second language acquisition TBI: taskbased instruction Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Research Orientation The strong criticism of the examinationoriented education calls for the reform on the English teaching in China. The new ECS (English Curriculum Standards) for senior schools proposes the mode of taskbased teaching and learning by means of participation, experience, munication and cooperation. As one of the most popular language teaching approaches in the world, taskbased instruction (TBI) has been widely advocated to improve the English teaching in China. A variety of textbooks are piled according to the taskbased principle. This thesis mainly focuses on the current situation of the implementation of TBI for senior English teaching in Dalian city and put forward some suggestions. Rationale for the Research The traditional 3Ps teaching approach Before discussing taskbased language teaching, we should consider the more traditional methods of language teaching. For many years, almost ever since there was foreign language teaching in China, the most influential and dominant approach has been 3Ps (Skehan, 20xx): presentation, practice, and production, which are the three main stages of classroom language teaching. This presentationbased approach concentrates on the grammatical system of the language. As a result, the focus of the language teaching is on the presentation and practice of grammar, and the automatic production of the target language, according to the linguistic rules learnt in the first and second stages. Teachers present the language segments to the learners in models, initially one item at a time. The first stage is generally focuses on a single point of grammar which is presented explicitly or implicitly to maximize the chances that the certain rules will be understood and mastered. This stage is followed by practice activities designed to internalize the newly learnt rules. In the second stage, learners do not express their own personal meanings. They only work out some more examples according to the rules and other language segments which bear not much relationship to 陜西師范大學(xué)教育碩士學(xué)位論文 2 their real life. Only in the production stage can learners get away from the control and they may be able to produce language based on meanings they want to express instead of those readymade meanings. Yet this also quite limited in many cases. Learners are usually seldom provided opportunities to develop the skills or strategies to convey municative meanings with the target language in real and concrete circumstances. The learners may know a lot about the grammatical rules, but can not municate with others in a real situation appropriately and fluently. The municative language teaching method Before the 1960s, language was more than simply a system of rules, and ―the task for language learners was to internalize these rules by whatever means were at their disposal‖ (Nunan, 1989). In other words, learners‘ priority was to master the structures of the language, while the consideration of meaning was seen as less important than form. However, during the 1970s, ―a much richer conceptualization of language‖ began to emerge. Language was considered and analyzed as ―a system for the expression of meaning‖, rather than as ―a system of abstract syntactic rules‖ (Nunan, 1989). In terms of learning, it is generally accepted that ―we need to distinguish between ?learning that‘ and ?knowing how‘‖ (Nunan, 1989). That is to say, learners need to distinguish between knowing various grammar rules and being able to employ these rules effectively and appropriately when municating. Because of the drawbacks of the above traditional methods of language teaching, linguists and language teaching specialists devoted themselves to the reform in teaching methodology. CLT has brought about revolutionary changes in language theory an