2018 Annual Conference of China English Language Education Association (CELEA2018)

197 / 2018-06-30 22:54:02

The communicativeness of activities in task-based English teaching in the Chinese context

tertiary education, task-based language teaching, communicativeness of activities, contextual factors, case study

Plenary track > 中国特色英语教学研究

Drawing on Littlewood’s (2004) communicative continuum, the study analyzes the communicativeness of activities as they are performed in tertiary-level task-based teaching in China. To this aim, we observed and audio-taped two Chinese university English teachers’ lessons and also interviewed the teachers as well as their students about their rationale or perception of the classroom activities. The results of the study show that (1) most activities in the two teachers’ lessons focus on meaning, in other words, are of high degree of communicativeness; (2) teacher’s belief and student characteristics might influence the communicativeness of the activities. We admit that this study cannot provide a comprehensive picture of how TBLT is implemented in CECL class by analyzing only two teachers’ classroom activities. In addition, due to the limited time and resources, we only collected data from each teacher’s class for one unit respectively. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the present study will contribute to the research into how TBLT is implemented in the Chinese context and may shed light on how college teachers can apply TBLT in their teaching.