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An Empirical Study of the Design and Implementation of Communicative Tasks in EFL Oral Class

Author: TangYongXia
Tutor: ZhangWenPeng
School: University of Electronic Science and Technology
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: college oral English teaching communicative tasks design and implementation negotiation communicative competence
CLC: H319
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 219
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Abstract

As the ultimate goal of English teaching is to foster the students’comprehensive competence of using the language, the teachers should create an active language atmosphere for the students to use language and develop their communicative competence. College English teaching desperately needs a teaching model that centers on the learners to foster their communicative competence. The Ministry of Education of the State points out clearly in the New English Curriculum Standard that Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) model should be adopted.Task-based Language Teaching, a branch of communicative language teaching, was put forward in the 1980s by language teaching researchers who attempted to apply the theories of language use to actual language teaching. Theories of language, theories of Second Language Acquisition and theories of language learning and teaching are its theoretical foundations. TBLT advocates that the teachers should provide a series of communicative tasks for the learner while the learners should communicate, cooperate, interact and negotiate with other learners to complete the assigned communicative tasks with certain goals, so that the learners’ communicative competence and the ability of solving problems can be fostered and developed. Therefore, the design of communicative tasks is the core of task-based language teaching whose ultimate goal is to foster the students’oral communication ability, and how to implement the tasks effectively is also very important. Therefore, it is of great importance to conduct research on the design and implementation of communicative tasks in EFL oral class.This study just attempts to explore whether the communicative tasks designed by EFL teachers for oral class can create an active atmosphere for the students to actively participate in the task activities, interact, negotiate and communicate with each other; and whether the designed communicative tasks are learner-centered and helpful for fostering the students’communication ability and comprehensive ability of using language. The research methods used in this study are classroom observation and followed-up interviews. The researcher carried three successive months’classroom observation on 12 EFL oral teachers and took notes while observing. After class, the researcher conducted followed-up interviews to ask the observed teachers questions related to task design and implementation. And 19 tasks design samples were collected from them. Finally, the researcher analyzed the collected communicative tasks design samples, the written notes and interview data. The result shows that the communicative tasks designed by EFL oral teachers are effective in fostering the students’interaction and developing their communicative competence, because the tasks are authentic and suitable for communicating; the components of tasks are of scaffolding sequence which contributes a lot to the learners’progress and facilitates the learners’performing the task on their own; the input medium are mostly visual and audio types which are easier for the students to comprehend and process; tasks activities share the most important characteristics of communication; and most teachers combined listening and speaking skills together and some combined reading and writing skills together instead of only providing speaking activities, which is helpful to cultivate the students’comprehensive ability of using language. Meanwhile, the researcher found out some problems in tasks design and implementation that the allocation of time to the components of task was not so appropriate, the overall structure of the task was not so reasonable and the input and output were not in balance.

An Empirical Study of the Design and Implementation of Communicative Tasks in EFL Oral Class

Abstract

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