2.2 Significance of This Study
TBLT is a relatively new thing because it was introduced to China in the late 1990s. Under the guideline of New National English Curriculum Standard (2001), task-based language teaching approach has been advocated and used in English teaching in middle schools. To achieve the goal of English teaching stereoscopic, network, characteristic, we must change the traditional language teaching approach．In the traditional English class, the teacher deals with texts “sentence by sentence” and “paragraph by paragraph”, explaining the language points, analyzing the sentences, providing the Chinese equivalents and giving examples to show the usage of certain words and expressions. All this makes students bored and tired, thus no interests in listening to English.
Support for Task-based approach to language instruction comes from the theoretical assumption that interaction is fundamental to language acquisition and that both learner comprehension and production play significant roles in interaction (Ellis, 1994, Nunan, 1993). This approach is quite different from the traditional language teaching approach, which emphasizes vocabulary, grammar and recitation. The researches have reached the conclusion that students trained with TBLT perform better than those trained with the traditional language teaching approach.
2.3 The Concept of TBLT
TBLT is a language teaching method which rose in the 1980s. TBLT is to set up a task. The task of language learning is targeted communication activities or is the process of communicative activities for achieving a specific target, teachers focus on a particular communicative purpose and language projects, design the operable and task-oriented teaching activities. The students through language activities can achieve the language purposes of learning the language and mastering the language. And the main thing is to develop students' ability of using English (Ellis, 2000:193-220).
2.4 The Theoretical Background of TBLT
The primary theory of learning underlying TBLT can be dated back to Krashen’s Language Acquisition Theory which is composed of five parts: the acquisition-learning theory, the monitor hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis, the input hypothesis and the affective filter hypothesis. The core of Krashen’s theory is the comprehensible input hypothesis which explains how people acquire language. Krashen insisted that comprehensible input is the one necessary and sufficient criterion for successful language acquisition. We acquire by understanding input containing structures that are a bit beyond our current competence. Namely, i+1 (where “i” indicates acquirers’ current level of competence, “1” refers to the stage immediately following “i”) Social Constructivism Theory believes that learning and development are social and cooperative activities. It emphasizes the importance of contextualized learning and the need for learners to make sense of their environment by assimilating prior understanding with new concepts and ideas within new contexts.
Humanism educational notion proposes to value students’ inpidual feeling and need, emphasizes the truthful inpidual learning, including cognitive and emotional whole-person education.
2.4.1 The Concept of CLT
By the beginning of the 1970s, in many parts of the language-teaching world, a period of disappointment and disorientation had set in amongst those who were active in seeking to improve language teaching methods. There was also a feeling that the search for the right method was futile in any case: there are so many inpidual differences amongst learners, situations and teachers, that they could not possibly all be served by one single teaching method. This belief has led teachers and methodologists to begin to explore how they can base their teaching on a more flexible framework of principles and procedures, which is less prescriptive than a fixed method and can be adapted to different situations. This attitude, which has coincided with the emergence of important new ideas about the nature of language and learning, has led to the shaping of the so-called “communicative approach”. Over the past three decades this approach has come to affect language teaching policy and practice in most parts of the world (see for example Littlewood,2007; Nunan,2003). 任务型教学法在中学英语课堂中的应用(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_5011.html