Teaching English Reading to EFL Students in Grade Nine: A Task-based Language Teaching

Abstract

Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), emerging in the 1980s, is a new type of language teaching approach emphasizes ‘learning by doing’, focusing on the student’s main status, and achieving the teaching goal through the assistance of teachers. In the first part of this article, brief introductions of TBLT, tasks and the teaching principles are respectively given. In the second part, guided by three of the teaching principles of TBLT proposed by Nunan, including learning to communicate through interaction in the target language, focusing on the learning process and attaching importance to the learner’s own personal experiences, a reading teaching plan for the grade nine students is presented. Learners are inspired to discover rules by experiencing language, and use the target language to communicate and solve problems in the process. Under the guidance of TBLT in this reading class on tea culture, we can find that during the most of the time in class, students can not only perform communication actively about tea topic but also perceive more related linguistic knowledge and consolidate reading skills in the process of completing a series of tasks independently or in cooperative ways. Thereby, the student-centered principle can be realized.