6.1. The Design of the Teaching Tasks in Class 10

6.2. Procedures of Completing the Teaching Tasks 11

7. Conclusion 12

Work Cited 13

1. Introduction 

     Since 1980s, with the proposal of task-based syllabus and its relevant teaching materials, Task-based Teaching Approach has been developing gradually and become the hottest issue in the English teaching. Task-based teaching, which takes the task as the central role, is a new developing form of communicative approach in the past twenty years. It transfers basic principle of language application into the classroom teaching method with practical meaning.

     Writing as one of the four skills of language learning is fundamentally a social action.  It is a means of communication, characterized by purposeful and contextualized interaction. For the high schools students the writing is more important because the writing accounts for about twenty points in the College Entrance Examination whose total points are one hundred and twenty. However, it is a pity that the effect of writing teaching is not satisfying. On the one hand, the students have not mastered the writing skills. On the other hand, some teachers pay little attention to the writing teaching or just focus on the input of theory of writing and overlooking the practice. In addition, some teachers simply concentrate on the outcome of the writing, with neglect of the process, therefore, the real writing skills of the students have not been cultivated. To make the matter worse, in order to make the students gain high marks in exams, some teachers demand the students to recite the model texts and imitate them. In this way, the students just imitate without their own creation. So as to change the situation of the teaching in high school English writing, the National English Curriculum advocates the Task-based Approach, which is aimed at cultivating the writing skills of students. It demands the teachers to attach high attention to the process of the writing, which has great effect on the developing the writing skills of the students.文献综述

     However, if we employ the Task-based Approach into the English writing class, the most important thing the teachers face is how to design the teaching tasks. This thesis will give a brief introduction to the application of this approach in teaching design in senior high school English writing. 

2. Literature Review

     The research concerned with the Task-based Approach has achieved great process both in the west and in China. In the 1980s, the mode of the Task-based Approach was first put forward and carried out by a British education expert. This mode is the further development of communicative language teaching. It has transformed the basic concept----language application into the practical class teaching method, which has fully reflected the student-centered education concept. From the 1980s, people have begun doing research on the Task-based Approach. For instance, in 1979, Prabhu has done a Bangalore Project in the Bangalore, which is in the south of the India. In the project, he has raised many kinds of tasks, and designed the learning content into many types of communicative tasks, where students could study when they finished the tasks. This project was considered as the first attempt to introduce the Task-based Approach and attracted the attention of many language teaching experts (Prabbu, 1987:23). Candin made a large contribution to the task level assessment, and he put forward a set standard of task selection and difficulty measurement (Candin, 1987:33).  Later a scholar considered that the acquisition of language must be through conversational interaction. He believed that the modified interaction is indispensable to language learning. Willis offered the operational guidance of classroom teaching to teachers. The main contribution of him is the proposal of the three steps of task-based teaching method (PTP), namely, Pre-task, task-cycle, Post-task (Willis, 1996:33). Afterwards, someone came up with the Input and Interaction Hypothesis which was the theoretical basis of task-based teaching. Therefore, the research about the Task-based Approach has become more and more popular in the west. With the further research about the Task-based Approach, its theory has been complete in the 1990s.